RConversation

Huge pro-China boost in Hong Kong's local elections

Hong Kong's pro-China parties, led by the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), did even better than expected in Sunday's District council elections, winning 115 out of 364, seats - up from the previous 62 seats. If you read Chinese all the numbers are here. English-language news reports here and here. Offers of resignations were heard this morning on the Democratic side.

Daisann McLane, author of the wonderful "Learning Cantonese" blog has just written a long post about her Saturday spent with pro-democracy politician Leung Kwong-hung - better known as "Long Hair" - while he went out to mobilize pro-democracy voters this weekend. She also hung out with Chan Po Ying, a district council candidate running in Kwun Tong under the League of Social Democrats. Daisann describes a situation in which the non pro-China vote appeared to have been split in Kwun Tong by what she called a "parachute" Civic Party candidate. The DAB incumbent won. Daisann analyzes the outcome as follows:

It is also human nature to follow the leader. And that is what the DAB is all about. They're taking orders from the Big Party over the border, demonstrating a lockstep discipline that Republican Chairman Karl Rove can only dream of. Meanwhile the pan-Democrats are trying to forge a winning team from a loud, messy family that includes wealthy barristers, feisty unionists, grassroots activists and civil servants with expensive hairdos. The DAB aren't really great campaigners. Their "platform" consists of repeating the correct party line, and their repertoire of tactics is straight out of the old school political playbook: smears, threats and a chicken and rice box for every voter. But compared to the pan-Dems, they look like pros.

She quotes Long Hair's final analysis: "We messed up the district council elections. We should have been more organized."

Through the work of my students I've been trying to follow this whole thing pretty closely. You can find more about Hong Kong's District Council elections at our Hong Kong Stories website than you'll find anywhere else in English that I know of. It's clearly student work - most had never covered an election before and some have still got some things to learn about reporting- but it gives a flavor I think for the atmosphere, issues, developments and personalities involved with Sunday's race. 

Hong Kong's elections are a great testing ground for the folks up North in Beijing:  They're learning how to go about winning elections against liberal democrats.

Tough times for Chinese bloggers

Tongue-in-cheek "patriotic" banners like this one created by "Xiucai" have been cropping up around the Chinese blogosphere. It reads: "Joyfully welcome the 17th Party Congress, building a harmonious society together. Xiucai is a good comrade. This site has temporarily shut down comments and forum features."

Xiucai's creation is just one of many dozens of examples of the latest official crackdown against blogs in the run-up to China's 17th Communist Party Congress - and the defiant response by many Chinese bloggers to the crackdown.  John Kennedy's epic post on Global Voices today has the full story. He writes:

...if war were to be declared on bloggers, is the state of today's China's blogsphere what it would look like? Starting this month we've seen blog posts being deleted in places where they almost never used to, comment sections being closed out of fear...

John describes, translates, and links to further information and discussion (from both Chinese and English sources) about the following:

• The latest self-discipline pledge for blog service providers and reactions to it.
• How the plugs have been pulled on Internet Data Centers (IDC's) all across China and how bloggers are reacting.
• Reports that more than 18,000 websites have been shut down in the past few months, with less than half of them for porn.
• Via memedia, one blogger describes the shut down of "three whole floors of fully-certified IDCs in one building in Shanghai."
• How a blogger who wrote critically of the Olympics had his blog shut down and was visited by police.
• How one social networking site yo2.cn has become a "ghost town."
• How four Chinese journalists who blog have been facing heavy censorship, and how one abandoned his blog and the other shut down his blog to protest constant deletion of their posts.
• The posting by one blogger of "the full list of requirements passed to their company by the Public Security Bureau, namely an order for the real-name registration and immediate closure of all non-compliant blogs, BBSes, message boards and any other interactive spaces they host which remains effective until the Seventeenth National Congress wraps up in late October." Read John's translation of the key sections of that order.

John also points to various legal and consumer actions that internet users have begun resorting to this year. In addition to anti-censorship lawsuits filed by bloggers in Shanghai and Beijing, a consumer complaints website in Guangzhou is demanding a public hearing over its impending closure. And Yeetai, the blogger suing China Telecom in Shanghai, has made a call on Twitter to let a thousand class-action lawsuits bloom.

Will any of those lawsuits ever get anywhere? Not long ago I wrote about the Beijing-based lawyer and blogger Liu Xiaoyuan who sued the blog-hosting service, Sohu.com, for censoring some of his blog posts. This past week he reported that his lawsuit was rejected by the Haidian district court in Beijing. He is appealing because he believes that the reasons for rejecting his suit are not legally valid. His efforts to get the local Chinese media to cover his case got nowhere. Suprise suprise. But so far, I haven't seen any Western media coverage of his case either...

Anti-Rightist campaign: China's censored history leaks around the Internet (in spite of Sohu)

In 1998, retired Xinhua News Agency journalist Dai Huang (now 79) published a book about his life -  including the 21 years he spent in labor camps after he was labeled a "rightist" in 1957 during the "anti-rightist campaign." His crime included: criticizing Mao's cult of personality.  Despite the fact that the book already had two print runs in the late 90's and early 00's, the publishing authorities have now blocked him from reprinting the book again. This is yet another indication that China's leadership has gotten more paranoid and insecure in many ways than they were in the late 90's - despite the fact that China's global influence and power have grown in recent years. 

The South China Morning Post reported earlier this week that a Beijing court has now rejected Dai's lawsuit against the publishing authorities,  in which he challenged the ban of his book as unconstitutional. (free link thanks to AsiaMedia)

Fortunately, Dai's entire book is available in Chinese online, as John Kennedy points out over at Global Voices. Maybe somebody will translate parts of it and put that online too?

Dai's lawyer is the well known civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang. Pu's Sohu blog, incidentally, has recently been deleted without explanation by the corporate net-nannies over at Sohu.  Did Pu Zhiqiang break any Chinese laws with anything he wrote on his blog? Was he warned by Sohu that he was doing anything that would cause his blog to be deleted? Have they told him on whose authority and according to what order by which government entity his blog was deleted? As a Sohu user does he have any way to appeal the deletion? No. Of course not. Why treat your users like adults when you don't have to? (Recall that several Chinese lawyers recently protested blog deletions by Sina.com as well.)  Thanks to John Kennedy for translating one of Pu's statements re-posted to a BBS.

The Chinese Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department convened a meeting at the beginning of this year laying out the ground rules on what should and shouldn't appear in China's media and publications. The Anti-Rightist campaign of 50 years ago was listed as one of the no-go-zones. Talking about it is a threat to today's leaders, apparently. The meeting was summarized in this article (in Chinese) which appeared in a Hong Kong-based publication and circulated around the Internet. It has since been translated into English at the Chinese Content Wiki. Here is a long excerpt containing the decisions regarding censorship of history:

-This year is the 50th anniversary of the anti-right movement. As events over the past few years demonstrate, many people bearing dissatisfaction with The Party have, through various guises, depicted and glamorized the "anti-right" period of history. Of these people, many are well-known scholars, but they have but one purpose: to smear the name of the Communist Party. For this reason, no memoirs or books regarding the "anti-right" period of history are allowed to be published, and any articles regarding "the anti-right movement" may not be printed.

-Based on practical experience from the past few years, some people in society are "breaking through" the Cultural Revolution, wholly disavowing Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong Thought, attempting and then achieving their comprehensive goal of disavowing the Communist Party of China. For this reason, not only must this kind of article not be published, but vigilance must also be increased.

-Starting today, all historical problems must be in accordance with: "The Resolution on a Number of The Party's Historical Problems Since the Founding of the Country" (hereafter, "The Historical Resolution"), review treatises from the older generation of revolutionaries like Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, as well as embodying the principles of "Looking Ahead in Solidarity". Criticism of historical events must adhere to "The Historical Resolution", and no so-called "first-hand material" or previously published articles, including those from People's Daily that violate The Historical Resolution may not be used as justification. Starting today, all books and articles that violate the spirit of The Historical Resolution may not be published.

-Starting today all specialized accounts published by current and past Central Government leaders must be in accordance with The Historical Resolution.

-Except for The Central Government Document Publishing House, all unauthorized specialized accounts and information regarding Central Government Leaders may not be quoted, compiled or distributed within the country.

-Articles regarding memoirs by current and former Central Government leaders, including those written by the authors in question, their families, secretaries and friends must be applied for by the person in question themselves through the Press and Publication Administration. Those not approved for publication must not be privately printed in any form, or transmitted via electronic means, and especially must not be published overseas.

Global Voices praised in State of the News Media 2007

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its massive annual report, State of the News Media 2007: An Annual Report on American Journalism. If you are interested in the future of journalism anywhere, this report is a must-read. I'm going to write something longer in the coming days - both on this blog and elsewhere - with my take-aways from that report and some other recent reports that help us get a grips on what journalists and news organizations are and aren't doing to reinvent themselves in the digital age.

But first things first.

I must pay tribute to the amazing group of people who run Global Voices.

As a result of their creativity, energy, and hard work GV was praised by this year's report one of the most "interesting experiments in new journalism" and scored as one of four "High Achievers" in an analysis of a broad range of news sites (broadly defined) including the NYT, Washingtonpost, CNN, Daily Kos, Digg, and many others.

The narrative overview of the entire report begins by stating that "The pace of change has accelerated" in the news business. It goes on to describe this rapid change, the sense of uncertainty at many news organizations. It also affirms that "traditional journalism is not, as some suggest, becoming irrelevant." A statement with which I fully agree. But it points out that professional journalists have been slow to adapt:

...But practicing journalism has become far more difficult and demands new vision. Journalism is becoming a smaller part of people’s information mix. The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows.

Journalists have reacted relatively slowly. They are only now beginning to re-imagine their role. Their companies failed to see “search” as a kind of journalism. Their industry has spent comparatively little on R&D. They have been tentative about pressing for new economic models, and that has left them fearful and defensive. Some of the most interesting experiments in new journalism continue to come from outside the profession — sites such as Global Voices, which mixes approved volunteer “reporters” from around the world with professional editors.

(Emphasis added.)

The report's Digital Journalism section evaluates 38 websites according to the following five criteria: user customization, user participation, use of multimedia, site depth, editorial branding, and revenue streams.   Global Voices came out as one of only four "High Achievers." The report says:

Only a few of the sites studied excelled across more than two of the content areas we studied. They might be called High Achievers, sites that scored in the highest possible tier for at least three of the five content areas.

Only four of the sites qualified, and they had little in common beyond the breadth of what they offered. They were a network TV site (CBS), a newspaper (Washington Post), a British television and radio operation (BBC) and an international citizen media site (Global Voices).

And what did these sites emphasize? All of them scored highly for the originality of their content. All of them also scored highly for the extent to which they allowed users to customize the content, to make the sites their own or make the content mobile. None of them, interestingly, scored particularly well at allowing users to participate. Only two, CBS News and the Washington Post, involved a lot of multimedia components.

(Emphasis added.)

I must point out that the main reason why GV shines, in my view, is that there are so many thousands of bloggers out there around the world with things to say and much to teach us - but who have no other way of being found easily by a broader audience. Global Voices is in many ways a no-brainer, just putting a bit of organized energy and some Web2.0 talent towards amplifying the amazing work that is already being done out there.

Here is the report's full analysis of GV (alphabetically, in between Foxnews.com and Google News):

Global Voices (www.globalvoicesonline.org )

Of all the Web sites we examined, Global Voices was in many ways the least conventional. The end result was that it scored high in several of the areas we measured. It was the only citizen media site that would fit our definition of a high achiever, a site that earned top marks in three of five content areas.

The site is non-profit, with an emphasis on relating information that the staff editors find interesting, not on providing the top news of the hour (or minute or day).

But Global Voices takes a unique four-step approach to identifying what is interesting. First, rather than searching stories from mainstream news outlets, editors cull through a vast number of blogs from around the world. The editors, who themselves are located across the globe, then decide which postings are worth passing on. Next, they add their own comments or background information to put the blog entries in context. Finally, when necessary, entries are translated into English, often by a different “language” editor.

Take, for example, January 10. In the afternoon the lead was “Philippine free press under attack.” The entry featured a lead-in by an editor noting that the Philippine press has been “one of the freest in the world” since Ferdinand Marcos was deposed, but reporting that the current first family “is harassing journalists by filing libel cases” against them. The post then ran blurbs from the Pinoy Press and the site Freedom Watch. The next post used the same approach to look at the Iraqi government’s efforts to register bloggers.

In our inventory, the site scored well, in the top tier, on customization. While its home page could not be modified by users, there were many RSS and podcast options available to users.

Global Voices was also one of only three sites studied to score in the top tier for depth. It did well because of the large number of stories it grouped together in packages and the archive it included.

The site also earned top marks for the degree to which it was offering a unique brand in which its own editorial process and judgment was emphasized. With thestories chosen by paid editors and with content that came from wholly staff, even when citing other sources, it exercised significant editorial quality control. The banner across the top of the page pays tribute to its many authors. The page’s logo and name sit next to the headshots of four bloggers, each one linking a short bio and a compilation of that blogger’s work. Each post then has the link to the original blog as well as a tag-line of the Global Voices editor. And running down a side column is the list of blog authors and the number of posts each has contributed to date.

The site also scored well, in the second tier, for user participation. It did not offer live discussion and interactive polls, two of the more controversial elements of web participation. But it contained a good deal of opportunity for users interact. In addition to the editorial choices, user content — through a user-based blog — is a big part of this site. At the end of each piece users are invited to “Start the conversation” by posting comments, which are moderated by site editors.

The one content area where this remarkably well rounded site did not stand out is for multimedia. This site is about words, 95% of the content available from the home page was narrative.

The site’s score for revenue streams placed it in the bottom tier as well – perhaps not surprising since it is a non-profit.

The strongest impression one has when visiting this site, however, is its international feel. The largest box of text is a list of countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Next to that is a thinner blue box with a list of topics ranging from Arts & Culture to Governance to History to Youth. Under that is a slim one-line search box that runs the width of the page.

Global Voices is not a site to visit to get the latest headlines or find out what the media are talking about. But it shines a bright light on issues the big media often pass by.

User participation and multimedia are two things the GV team is working to improve. We are putting the finishing touches on a major site redesign which we hope will be unveiled in the coming weeks.

Finally, I cannot end this post without a hats off to Boris Anthony, GV's information architect, whose genius with RSS feeds, blogging software, and Web2.0 in general is the reason we got such high marks for customization and depth. He is assisted by the young and sharp Jeremy Clarke and several others who help them from time to time. All of them could be making a lot more money working on for-profit ventures. But fortunately for everybody, they place high value on the opportunity to innovate and to be part of media history.

Congo park rangers blogging from the front line

Tired of blogs chewing over the same old fat? Four elite park rangers in eastern Congo are now armed with cameras and blogs as well as rifles and know-how, as they work to protect the few remaining mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park from rebels, poachers and land invasions.

read more | digg story

The above post is what happens when you use the automatic "Blog It" function in Digg. This is definitely a good way to generate traffic on a website. Here is the sequence of events:  I saw this post on Global Voices linking to this blog post by a Londoner named Fred blogging from the DRC about how Congo park rangers are blogging. At the bottom of his blog post was a "digg this" link. I was so enthused about what I learned from  his post that I felt that I must help bring more attention to it with my little vote. Fred (who interestingly has a button to auto-translate his blog into Chinese) writes:

...I highly recommend taking a look at what may be the only Congolese blogs written in English (Diaspora excluded - if I’m wrong about that, please let me know). Wildlife Direct deserve bounteous credit for arming three elite park rangers in Eastern DRC with cameras and blogs:

• Elie Mundima commands the Rangers in Virunga National Park, where he says nearly 100 rangers have died protecting mountain gorillas from land invasions, poachers and rebels in the past 10 years
• Atamato is based at Ishango, on the northern shores of Lake Edward. His job is to protect the last remaining hippos in Virunga
• Aloma Major has been using his blog to have a conversation with a school in Colorado (more of a monologue, so far: I wish they’d leave some comments)
• Paulin Ngobobo is a senior warden with the Congolese wildlife authorities. His most recent post includes pictures of a newborn mountain gorilla called Ndeze

I was just poking around their blogs. Great stuff: wonderful pictures and videos, and real windows onto the lives of some dedicated Congolese park rangers. If you care about African wildlife you should definitely follow their blogs. A great example of one less thing I ever would have known about if it weren't for Global Voices.

There are, by the way, many more Congolese blogs written in French - from which Alice Backer frequently translates excerpts. You can see them all on GV's DRC page.

When talking about the difference between blogs and conventional journalism, why the two complement each other, and why I think we need both, I love to point to GV's DRC page and contrast it with the New York Times' Congo page... The NYT has some excellent journalism which GV cannot duplicate, but I would note that the last NYT story on that page is from November... while GV continues to link to and sometimes translate fresh blog posts coming regularly out of the DRC - whether or not there is some new disaster or conflict or election.

GV's coverage of some countries and regions is stronger than others which is due in part to whether it is easy or difficult to find active volunteers to help us represent their country and region. We're strong on China but weak on Japan and Korea for example, because we've had problems finding Korean and Japanese bloggers who are interested in spending the time to introduce the conversations from their blogospheres to the English-speaking world. If anybody out there knows some strong bilingual Korean and Japanese bloggers who would like to help us out, please have them get in touch with me.

Preparing to embarrass myself

(Click to enlarge poster).

I somehow agreed to be on a panel tomorrow called News Uncovered, discussing how the Hong Kong media covers (or doesn't cover) international news. All the other panelists will be speaking Cantonese, except yours truly, who will be speaking in Mandarin. If you live in Hong Kong and know one of those languages and feel like coming to make fun of my street Mandarin and rusty vocab, feel free. It would also be great to have some folks asking provocative questions.

You may be wondering: I just showed up in Hong Kong. How am I qualified to speak about the quality of the Hong Kong media's international news coverage? When I asked that very question to the organizers, they replied that they wanted me to be the person who brings a more international perspective to the debate and ties the discussion to the issue of global news coverage in other countries.

The one observation I will make about HK news coverage of international stories is that when I have encountered HK journalists in mainland China or in other countries, 99% of the time they are in a big pack. Outside of Hong Kong it seems very rare to run across a solo HK journalist striking out on his or her own on a story that none of his or her competitors aren't also covering. Talking to Hong Kong journalist friends about the reasons why, people say it has a lot to do with the editorial pressures that news editors put on the journalists not to "miss" anything that the competition may have. Journalists are not rewarded for doing original work, especially if it happens at the expense of not being present at the same press conference that everybody else plus their dog and uncle attended. Go figure. (To be fair, Western news organizations aren't immune to such tendencies either, but with the HK media it seems much more extreme.)

Other than that I'll stick to my usual themes: issues of global news and attention imbalances, the rise of international blogging as an alternative source of international story-telling, and the debate amongst U.S. newsies and media pundits over the future (or end?) of "foreign correspondence. " More of my recent rantings by me here and here, plus a couple new articles on the demise of the "foreign correspondent" - both very worth reading - in the Washington Post and on the website of the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

I expect to learn quite a lot from the other panelists and hopefully from the audience about what journalism schools like the JMSC might be able to do to encourage better international reporting by Hong Kong's media.

Neha wins Bloggy Valentine contest

I'm so pleased to learn that Caribbean writer and critic Nicholas Laughlin's number one choice in the Global Voices Valentines Day poetry contest was my favorite as well! 

Madam, I am 28, single is by our South Asia editor Neha Viswanathan, a very talented and very original writer.

Here it is:

    Madam, I am 28, single.
    I live alone, and nobody
    has my Orkut password.

    I have never had a girl
    friend. Madam, I think
    I am lonely. Are you?

    Scrap me with your
    ladyfingers. On IM we
    will profess online love.

    Don’t tell me you are
    married. Does not say so
    on your very public profile.

    On Valentine, I hunt for
    empty scrap books. I am
    finding your lovely self Madam.

Congratulations Neha!

Reuters Africa: breaking new ground

Reuters has taken an important and trend-setting step with Reuters Africa.

It is important in several ways. First, it demonstrates Reuters' commitment to covering Africa not only as a general news story but also as a global business story -  to an extent that I have not seen in other global English-language media.

As Reuters Africa editor John Chiahemen told The Guardian: "We want to show that Africa can be covered as a business story, not just a disaster story. While it is true that African information is available from other sources, there is no single media I know that has the breadth of content Reuters has available."

A press release elaborates further:

Reuters Africa features an interactive map to access local Reuters news across the continent, organized by country. Reuters Africa also provides extensive economic, business and financial news and data, including stock and currency market data and company information, from around the continent. Reflecting the importance of commodities to many African economies, the site features exclusive online content on metals and mining, energy and oil, and agricultural commodities.

This is important. My friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman has written a great deal about how the global English-language media (and entertainment industry) needs to start treating Africa like a place and an opportunity - not just a crisis. In his work on global media attention, he shows how Africa gets the least amount of media attention than anywhere  else (nobody is too surprised at this), but more interestingly he also argues (original pdf article here) that there is a connection between this lack of global media attention and the inability of businesses and policymakers in Western developed nations to take African countries seriously as destinations for investment and business.

Is China's growing business influence in Africa now an added incentive for Western news organizations to take Africa seriously as a business story? At any rate, Reuters deserves kudos for taking the lead.

Second, Reuters Africa extends the news agency's commitment to build synergies between the work of Reuters reporters and the work of bloggers from around Africa, who paint a much more diverse and vibrant picture of the continent than mainstream news reporting tends to do. Global Voices Managing Editor Rachel Rawlins, who used to work as a correspondent in Africa for the BBC writes:

It’s frequently depressing reading accounts of Africa in the mainstream media. Doubly so, in fact. Firstly because what is defined as worthy of reporting is, well, depressing. And secondly because it so seldom engages with the complex and vibrant reality of the continent in all its massive diversity, preferring instead to deal in simplistic stereotypes.

(Disclosure: Reuters is the main funder for Global Voices which I co-founded so there is a reason I'm paying a great deal of attention to its site and its significance - but I'd like to believe that I'd find it significant even if I wasn't connected to GV, and that many people who aren't will.  If you think I'm completely full of it please hit the comments section and let me know - nobody has ever hesitated in the past!)

As  you'll see from the screenshot that Rachel took from the Uganda page of Reuters Africa, each country page not only includes news headlines but also the Global Voices Uganda feed, pointing to blog posts coming from Uganda, selected by people like our amazing Africa editor Ndesanjo Macha.

   

Mark Glaser at MediaShift has a great post titled Reuters Looks to Africa and a Decentralized Future for Media in which he interviews Reuters president Chris Ahearn on why his company has begun to take blogs seriously. My favorite quote: "last I checked, the business we’re in is to inform people."

Yup, and the bloggers we link to on Global Voices are as serious about doing that as journalists are.

Two more key quotes:

...as we start to arm the quote-unquote mainstream with the same tools as journalists, editors and reporters have, there’s an interesting asymmetry here. I talk to a lot of people who say, ‘How come blogging software seems to be a richer news-telling experience than some of the tools we put into journalists’ hands?’ Interesting dynamic, that.

and:

The cost of newsgathering has plummeted. How do we take that and deploy more resources into newsgathering and news presentation? Why is it that right now, at a time when the world is getting more difficult to understand based on everything that’s happening are news organizations pulling out of so many places around the world? Why?

It's worth reading the whole post to get a further glimpse into Chris' vision of where the industry is going, and why news organizations should recognize that we are entering a "golden age" for journalism - not leaving one.

In the same post Mark also interviewed Ethan, who pointed out there's a lot more potential synergy between Reuters journalism and Global Voices' global community of bloggers that so far has not been explored:

There’s a rising tone of anxiety and despair in the Zimbabwean blogosphere, for instance, but it won’t ‘break’ as a story unless the civil service strike goes off tomorrow and sparks a violent government response,” Zuckerman said via email. “In a perfect world, I think we’d find a way to help our friends at Reuters anticipate stories that might break based on our coverage — that hasn’t happened as much as I’d like.

Perhaps that will be next.  But as Rachel points out in her post on Global Voices, the blogosphere  has a long way to go as well:

This is a great step forward, but there’s still a long way to go. There are large and exciting blogging communities in several countries, such as Nigeria and Kenya but there are other areas where coverage is very sparse and still others, such as Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, where online expression is severely curtailed by the government.

We hope that the involvement of bloggers in projects such as this not only gives a platform to those whose voices have long been left unheard but also encourages others to join the conversation and brings pressure to bear on behalf of those who want to speak but cannot.

Amen sister.

Join the Open Source Translation Blogging project

Guangzhou-based blogger and Global Voices language editor John Kennedy is leading an exciting new initiative which Roland Soong has dubbed the Open Source Translation Blogging project.. and which "Letters from China" calls the Great Hall of the Bloggers.

John's idea, which started in a comments thread on LfC's blog, is similar to a dream Roland has had for a couple of years: To build a cooperative of bilingual bloggers who coordinate translation of important conversations taking place on the Chinese Internet - particularly stuff that we think will help the English-speaking world to understand China better.

Roland has become one of the most famous Chinese-English "bridge bloggers," bringing articles, blog posts, conversations, and debates from the Chinese-language Internet to the attention of the English-speaking world.  But there are many other people doing this on their own blogs. They include John, LfC, the good folks at Danwei, Interlocals, the China Media Project, the team at China Digital Times and many many more bilingual bloggers scattered around Greater China and across the globe.

The problem, as John points out, is that so far there has been little co-ordination about who is working on what, and people are often worried about duplication (i.e., whether Roland will beat them to the punch after they spend hours working on something).

While informal coordination has been happening all along, a lot more material could be translated a lot faster and more efficiently if the coordination were made more systematic.

Anybody can sign up to join the project on this wiki - but please only do so if you read both Chinese and English and are serious about being involved.  You can participate in a couple of ways:

1. Sign up as a translator blogger
2. Suggest articles for translation

Roland is already using the wiki actively to list what he's working on. I've posted something in the suggestion list. Etc. The ball is rolling.

I am thinking maybe we may also want to designate a special OSTB tag in Technorati, del.icio.us, and for people to use as a category on their blogs, etc. so that anybody who translates anything as part of the OSTB project, and publishes it on their blog, can then automatically feed their OSTB blog posts into a special OSTB web feed. 

Global journalism, hiring, firing, and the Internet

This post is in reaction primarily to these works:

"Goodbye Gutenberg," Nieman Reports, Winter 2006 Issue 

Jill Caroll, "Foreign News Coverage: The U.S. Media's Undervalued Asset," Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Working Paper Series, Fall 2006, #D-39 (downloadable as PDF here). (NOTE: Jill's paper has been taken down temporarily from the Shorenstein website due to several errors. I am told that they will put it back up when the errors have been corrected.)

Ethan Zuckerman, "Are foreign correspondents going extinct? Or just changing their stripes?," My Heart's in Accra, Jan 26, 2007.

Michael Hirschorn, "Get Me Rewrite: A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age," The Atlantic Monthly, December 2006 issue.

I was making my way through the latest issue of Nieman Reports with its cornucopia of articles about how the Internet is changing journalism - and that the change can be for the good if we make it so - when my friend Ethan Zuckerman wrote a very thoughtful post reacting to Jill Caroll's academic paper defending foreign news coverage.

(Jill as you recall was the freelancer working for the Christian Science Monitor who was held hostage in Iraq - making me pause in a moment of deep respect before venturing to criticize anything she has to say.)

Unfortunately the Boston Globe was not listening to Jill's arguments: that foreign news coverage is highly valued by newspaper readers; it and builds trust, credibility, and uniqueness that can't easily be gained in other ways; and that foreign news is actually good value when you consider these factors. A friend of mine is one of the four remaining Globe correspondents being called home from overseas. It is truly depressing for a person who has spent most of her journalistic career as a foreign correspondent to be faced with a job market in which there are fewer and fewer opportunities.

But are newspapers going to be talked into reversing this epidemic of foreign bureau closures?  Not likely. Unless the entire industry - including individual journalists themselves - start thinking radically outside the box.

Jill offers two suggestions to make foreign correspondence more affordable and justifiable to newspapers:  use more freelancers rather than setting up full-time bureaus with full-time staffs (Jill herself was a freelancer in the Middle East), and do more foreign stories with local angles.

Ethan is surprised that Jill did not address the role of news agencies in any detail. He also points out that she doesn't really deal with the Internet much other than to say that it has hurt circulation and advertising revenues. Ethan's point about the web and foreign news has mainly to do with the potential of citizen media, and how news organizations should be thinking about how to tap the power of thousands of talented and articulate bloggers around the world.

But the challenges and opportunities of the Internet go beyond that - as the many contributors to Goodbye Gutenberg discuss.

Phillip Meyer writes: "It is still possible to save journalism, but maybe not journalism as we know it." One could substitute "foreign correspondence" for "journalism" in that sentence.

As a teacher of journalism in an age where j-schools also need to reinvent themselves to remain relevant, I was particularly struck by the following passage by Roanoke Times editor Michael Riley about how news companies need to rethink themselves:

"No longer are we purely media companies; we must become technology companies, too, and that means we must raise our technology IQ to compete in a digitally transformed world.  A big part of our success will be tied into rethinking what type of people we hire. The premium, moving forward, will rest on attracting more innovators into our midst and finding ways to give them the freedom and the backing they need to experiment and help move us into a new realm in which we can preserve the journalism and make a robust business model work."

If news organizations are going to do a better job at covering international news in original ways and reverse recent trends, people wanting careers covering global stories are going to have to reinvent themselves as much as their employers must.  So must editors who handle international news, if they want to save their own jobs. This is just reality.

Here are a few directions such innovations might take. None of these ideas are mine alone.

- Try harder not to duplicate agency and each other's coverage. In the Internet age when everybody is checking Google and Yahoo for their breaking news anyway (or Reuters and Bloomberg if they work in finance), people are still spending way too much time duplicating stories that the agencies are covering - or that all the other foreign correspondents are covering. Editors have got to allow reporters to break away from the pack and do truly original reporting that readers won't find anywhere else, and which they will come to value and miss if it's absent. Reporters need to push harder to do such stories even when editors are calling up and saying "Reuters [or the NYT, or CNN or whoever] reported xxx can you file something on it?" 

- Focus on global stories that have clear and direct relevance to your core home audience, and make the connection much more clear.  My last three years living back in the U.S. really brought home to me just how unreal the rest of the world seems to most Americans. Sure, there's international news coverage, but even for those who read and watch it, the connection to people's daily lives is not very clear or well understood. This I believe is partially the fault of how news organizations structure their coverage. There is almost no foreign news story that doesn't have a U.S. domestic angle and almost no U.S. domestic story (especially anything economic or business related) that doesn't have international angles to it. Maybe rather than getting rid of foreign news reporters what we really need to eliminate are the separate sections of the newspapers and newscasts that silo foreign news into a category of topics that are distant and strange. The rest of the world is not distant and strange at all. It reaches into your kitchen and your bedroom daily. We need to do a better job of covering the world as the interconnected place it truly is. If we do that properly, I believe having reporters overseas will seem much more indispensable than it does today.

- Create communities of conversation around your reporters. This idea was articulated well by Michael Hirschorn in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly. He sees one possible future in which star reporters are better off as freelancers:

It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists–like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

The solution he proposes: "Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms." 

In this scenario played out, some readers who are serious Friedman fans would get their New York Times content primarily via Times headline feeds running through Friedman's blog - rather than the Times' front page. There on the blog they would discuss his stories with him and each other, and share recommendations for other journalism by other people.

Under this model, I should think, a news organization has real incentives to support such communities of conversation around its star foreign correspondents, whose talents can be better showcased and who can help be a "draw" for the news organization's other content. If the Christian Science Monitor had Jill Carroll doing exactly that, would more people wind up reading the CSM more faithfully? A certain segment of news junkies like me probably would.

- Involve local immigrant communities and diasporas. This is something that Doug McGill - a former foreign correspondent now in Minnesota - has been going on about for some time: the need for more "glocal" reporting that ties local communities to the broader world. One way to do this is for local newspapers to get a better grip on where the ethnic immigrant communities in their city come from and do a better job at covering those countries, with a special emphasis on stories that span between hometown and homeland. How many U.S. cities with large Ethiopian or Vietnamese populations do a decent job at covering those countries? How well do Hong Kong papers cover the global Hong Kong diaspora? This doesn't necessarily mean opening lots of new bureaus. By utilizing a smart combination of freelancers and readers/viewers who may not be professional journalists but who have stories to tell and things to say that are relevant to your audience, one can bring a great deal more global coverage into the mix - coverage of things that your local community wants and needs to know.

- Engage with citizen media. The Reuters partnership with Global Voices, the BBC's increasingly active engagement with bloggers, and many other initiatives are showing how professional reporting and citizen media can complement each other well. As the Washington Post has found, displaying the blog posts that are linking to your stories helps spread a web of global conversation to your journalism and builds readership and audience loyalty. Then there is a modified OhMyNews model in which editors can work with volunteer citizen-reporters in places where no professional freelancers are available - or on specialized topics they're not qualified to cover.

The web enables all of these things in ways that simply weren't possible before. As Jon Palferman writes: "Given its transformative capacity, we can regard the Web as a problem or we can see it as a potential solution to a broader problem that we would have had to face anyway."

What does all of this mean for young people planning to enter the profession? I think it means that there still are opportunities for young people to go into international news - and for not so young foreign correspondents to re-invent their careers. But we can't expect that things will ever go back to the way they were, or that people ten years from now can have the same careers that some of us had ten years ago (or in some cases even one or two years ago). But if you're not afraid of the web, have an open mind and are ready to innovate, I believe the opportunities will be there - if you help create them.