For the past few days now, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about Tibet. There isn’t much I can add, really. I’ve never been there, and what is worth saying has largely been said by people closer to the situation more knowledgeable about the complexities involved.
So I’ve been reading, and because the internet is social, I’ve been posting links to news from Western China on Twitter, Google, Del.icio.us and Facebook. I’ve compiled those links into one RSS feed, which should be available within mainland China, where the news sites themselves are blocked.
I can’t help feeling a twinge of regret at not being in China right now. But being in America has its advantages. Namely, I don’t need a proxy to get my news. And realistically, Dalian is not meaningfully closer to Tibet than California. I can probably get more information here than I could there, or at least I can get it faster.
Hopefully, the links I’ve posted will be useful for anyone trying to keep up with the news. As much as anyone who’s been in China a month knows how to get around the Great Firewall, it’s also true that searching for news using proxies can be mind-numbingly slow and endlessly frustrating. That’s what the Firewall does: It makes it just difficult enough that casual browsers will go someplace more harmonious.
About three paragraphs into the story I was writing on a the homecoming party for a squad of local Marines, my editor popped her head around the cubicle with a suggestion:
“Do you think you could take out the drinking and the swearing?” she asked. We were, she reminded me, a family newspaper. (Note: It’s been a couple years since I worked there.)
I’ve never figured out what that means, exactly, a “family newspaper.” We printed some grisly stuff: car and train wrecks, blood stains on sidewalk, skeletons of houses gutted by fire.
And marines are vulgar. Take away the drinking, swearing, crude talk of sex and how it relates to consuming a Jello-shot, and you have something more bland, less real. (My marine friends call this the Army). These men had just come back from their second tour in Iraq. Foul language was the least of their issues.
Pat Thornton sent me on this nostalgia trip with his post this morning, noting that Stars & Stripes grapples with the same issue:
My paper is willing to print “shit†in a story but only in certain editions. Our Mideast edition is keeping the word, while our editions in Europe and the Pacific are dropping it. The Web will not feature the word as well.
…
The expletive was left in the Mideast edition because it’s a theater of war. The feeling was that troops in combat have a different community standard than those living on base with their families.
As much as it is our job, as journalists, to promote civic and civil debate, to calm the passions of our readers with facts and with reason, to enlighten, we’re also in the business of saying it like it is.
China wouldn’t be my first guess of places American lawmakers would look for legislative ideas. But Mashable points to a proposed law in Kentucky that would make it illegal for websites to allow anonymous comments and fine site owners $500 for the first offense. Tim Couch, the state representative who sponsored the bill, says it’s necessary to fight “online bullying,” according to WTVQ in Lexington.
The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.
Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.
If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.
Sounds familiar, no? Couch’s reasoning is different, but this sounds awfully familiar to China’s old Real Name Registration rule for bloggers.
China, at least, could get away with trying blunt-instrument regulation of online speech. But Kentucky? Bit of a problem with the First Amendment there. Not to mention the problem of enforcing such a rule. As Mashable notes, much of this stems from suicides supposedly linked to MySpace, which is starting to sound like a newer and less bat-hungry version of Ozzy Osbourne.
This time around, in response to recent suicides on MySpace and other events taking place online that resulted supposedly from online, US lawmakers are willing to suspend the right to speak freely to apply a bandaid to the problems of American young ones’ self esteem. Understandably, when the irresponsible actions of a few lead to the death of a family member, immediate and decisive action is wanted to rectify the issue legally. Unfortunately, banning all anonymous commentary online is about like banning all gossip publications because Britney Spears became a bad mother due to overzealous paparazzi, or banning everything from pocket knives to nuclear arms because someone was mugged at the corner store.
As I mentioned, this debate has happened already. China toyed with it, then gave up. Maybe Couch would benefit from revisiting what Wang Xiaofeng wrote two years ago:
Insults and swearing did not start because of the Internet or blogs; libel started when people first started writing. Fraud and confidence tricks are ancient crimes, you can’t just blame them on the Internet. Is it possible that the real name system will solve all these problems? It’s like that old joke: if the eighth steamed bun is the one that makes you full, why bother eating the first seven?
You knew that, but it’s time we told you again. Death, disease, poverty that defies definition. It’s an old storyline. Sure, sometimes we need to be reminded how bleak things are, but at times, I find myself screaming at such a story: “SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THIS?”
Like today, though it really wasn’t about Africa.
Editor & Publisher added up circulation losses at newspapers across the country, finding, without much surprise, things are bad.
In just four years the top newspapers in the U.S. have collectively lost about 1.4 million copies in daily circulation, E&P has found. But since the reported numbers come out every six months, the overall decline for individual papers may not hit home for many. Each fall off is usually in the low- to mid-single digits — but it sure adds up.
Fair enough. Good to know. So what do we do about it? I have a few thoughts.
Make this everyone’s issue.
I didn’t think much about the business side of newspapers in college. I hated it. That’s what business managers were for. But the business has changed, and now we all need to get in on the discussion. It’s not up to publishers, editors, Sam Zell or Stanford to save us.
Figure out what we’re doing right. Do more of it.
E&P leaves a big chunk out of this story. Hint: It starts with www. Much as we’ve lost in paper, we’ve gained in web audience. More, even. I’m not Polly Anna-ish about this, but we do need to understand where we can grow and make the most of it.
When in doubt, think small.
Quit your bitching and fix something, anything. Make your life easier. Stop worrying about macroeconomic trends forecasting an impending downturn in the likelihood of further streamlining in corporate structure. Go gather some data and graph it on Swivel. Shoot some video of how said data effects people’s lives and upload it to YouTube/Brightcove/Blip.tv. Publish it using an open-source CMS.
Look, the business model went and changed. The print edition isn’t what it used to be, I get it. But it’s time to stop whining and start building something worthy of all the nostalgia we keep throwing at ink on paper.
Sometimes it’s worth going back to basics, to remember what I thought I knew, just to make sure I didn’t forget it. Sometimes I find something important.
I was putting together a to-do list the other day for a columnist at a NorCal newspaper I’d like to work at. He wanted to get web savvy and I had a few suggestions I shared over a beer, and more I offered over email. The first of those was a this video, RSS in plain English.
I thought about that video again while I was in Berkeley last night, listening to several panelists talk about the need to “monetize the web.” How do we bring, and keep, more eyeballs on our pages as often and as long as possible?
But I think that’s the wrong approach, and I think it’s wrong because of what I told that columnist the other day:
Content can now go where readers are, and readers no longer have to, or expect to have to go find it.
Consider that thought in the context of this panel:
Everyone is talking about the future of the newsroom in this new digital world where young people get their news from YouTube and Facebook, and traditional print journalists have seen hundreds of their brethren laid off or bought out. Join us for a discussion of how these changes are affecting journalists. What can media workers’ unions do? Should journalists hurry up and learn how to blog and podcast before it’s too late?
With featured speakers:
Jeanne Carstensen, Salon.com Managing Editor
Louis Freedberg, California Media Project Director and San Francisco Chronicle former editorial writer
Luther Jackson, San Jose Newspaper Guild Executive Officer
Chris O’Brien, of the (possibly defunct) San Jose Mercury News Rethink project
Moderator Rob Gunnison called it “the best discussion of ‘I don’t know’” he’d heard in a long time. Somehow, that doesn’t give me much comfort.
Very little of the talk, in fact, left me with much confidence in the state of professional journalism in Northern California. Were panels like these my major source of inspiration, I’d be as depressed as my friends who went through that j-school and are now with me in the job hunt. Much of the dialog seemed to ask, “How do we do what we’ve been doing, what we’ve been telling ourselves for so long is so great, and now get people who don’t necessarily share that opinion to fund us?”
Plus some blogger bashing, talk of government or non-profit support and vilifying of Google and Yahoo.
O’Brien was by far the most impressive on stage. He brought up a reader survey asking where people went for information. Their answers:
“The way you live your life is that your most important source of information is your friends,” he explained. “Someone telling you what movie to go see is more important than Roger Ebert.”
Right, so, this is a delivery problem. Solutions, if I may:
Make your content easy to find. SEO the hell out of it. Redesign news organizations’ websites so they don’t make my eyeballs bleed.
Make your content easy to share. Add Share chicklets to stories. Offer RSS feeds. Keep links alive, permanently. Build Facebook apps.
These are small things. Incremental. Cheap. But how many newsrooms have done even this much? And of those that have, how many are in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area?
But the larger point may be something else O’Brien said:
People are very nervous about the idea of blowing up the newsroom. To a large degree, people in the newsroom, I’m not sure they really believe there’s a fundamental problem.
If we can’t make little changes, how do we make bigger ones?
Got this in an email from my old journalism teacher:
Anne Braden, and her husband Carl, fought for equal rights in a time and place where holding such ideas could get you killed. Both came close to that on a number of occasions. Anne died in 2006, and this short doc really gives a feel for who she was: unassuming, brave beyond measure, relentless in her pursuit of justice. Take a moment and remember or discover.
I have a question for the journalism industry. Instead of sinking literally millions of dollars/pounds/euros into content management systems either in the form of a payment to one of the CMS companies or for bespoke development, why not take one of the open-source systems and become part of the development community?
Well folks, why not?
Most newspapers should not be in the business of building their own content management systems, unless they happen to have the talent already on staff. And buying something proprietary, with development happening behind closed doors and out of newspapers’ control, is probably going to lead to very sluggish responses to a changing market.
A better use of limited resources is customization, styling, getting the navigation down and easy and building your newspaper.com into a brand with the kind of loyalty common only among Mac users and Volkswagen drivers (admittedly, I fall into one of those categories).
Drupal isn’t easy to jump into, and most newspapers, I’d guess, aren’t ready. But someone needs to. Someone needs to start building the modules and templates and custom install packages that will get us closer.
The point is to get something open source, with a development community bigger than the guys in the back of the newsroom. The more that get in, the more we’re all likely to get out of this.
A quick note to readers: This post marks the official start of a new direction for this blog. As I’m back in California now and looking for jobs in journalism, expect to see more posts in the future about newspapers and online media. But fear not, China fans, the Middle Kingdom is still on my radar, and Eyes East will still drop the occasional Dalian nostalgia post, if only to stay on CLB’s blogroll. Really though, more China posts are coming. Stay tuned.
*Disclosure: I’m one of the founders of DalianDalian.
The Beijing Meteorological Bureau couldn’t have picked a better day to hold its press conference detailing their plans to predict—nay, to control—the weather for the Olympic Games.
Outside, a cloudless, smogless sky. The sun shined. It wasn’t even as cold as late January in the capital can be.
The press conference, of course, was inside, in a well-appointed but stuffy room of the Olympic media center, which kept all such well-controlled elements safely outside. I suppose that was the safe bet, after last year’s interruption: when a sandstorm covered a tree-planting ceremony in fine yellow dust.
Officials with the Bureau promised ongoing and up-to-the-minute reports on weather conditions during the games. They also said a much-hyped rain mitigation system—one that chemically-seeds clouds using aircraft and artillery batteries—will disperse light showers before they reach the city, promising a dry opening ceremony on Aug. 8.
Some concerns:
August is the rainiest month, on average, in Beijing (source)
Beijing’s air quality, especially when it hasn’t rained in a while, still sucks
One of the chemicals used to seed clouds, silver iodide, may not be so green
Here’s my big hang-up: Rain is one of the best cleansers of Beijing’s air. This city would be downright livable, pleasant even, if it just rained every other day, or every night. Almost all the best days I’ve spent here come after a rainstorm.
But if they prevent rainclouds from reaching the city, will that just leave all the smog in the atmosphere?
There are other plans in place to fight air pollution. Factories will shut down. Cars will be kept off the ground. But Beijing’s topography, similar to that of the Los Angeles Basin, is uniquely good at trapping dust and smog around the city.
The best way to wash it all away, in my experience, is to have a little rain.
Update: Photos and links added. Also, the picture above came to me by email, but I don’t know the original source. Can anyone help ID it so I can give proper credit?
I know this seems like a good time to be in China, and hence, an awkward time to leave. I had planned to stay until the Olympics.
I wish there were an easy way to explain why I’ve decided to go back to California, but there isn’t. I woke up one day back in November with one clear thought in my head: “Time to go home.”
The best reasons I can give are my girlfriend and my grandparents. In about two weeks, my girlfriend and I will hit the four year mark. The past 18 months of that have been spent on different continents–Africa and Asia–with the brief exception of this summer when we spent two months traveling together in Madagascar. It’s time to try for a normal(ish) relationship.
My grandparents are in their 80s. I won’t get any time back with them. That’s more important to me than the Olympics, or anything else China does.
Leaving China feels as strange as coming here in the first place. Both decisions were spur of the moment. I can’t say whether either is or was the right course of action.
This is by no means the end of my interest or involvement with China, nor is it the end of this blog. The country is far too interesting, and I’m still fascinated by it. Who knows, I may even come back for the Olympics if the right opportunity comes up.
I’m going to miss Dalian. As cities in China go, this is one of the best. It’s one of the few places in Asia I’d want to live long-term.
Much of the hype is true: It is one of the cleanest cities in China. It benefits from being international and multicultural. It remains an affordable place to live, despite a growing economy.
The local expats here remain a tight community, even as the number grows. Dalian feels like a small town in a big city.
For anyone thinking of coming here, short- or long-term, by all means email me (eyeseast at gmail.com). For continued blogging coverage, some suggestions:
Rick at Panda Passport: My friend Rick, one of my favorite people in China, also finds some of the wackiest stuff on the Web. He also writes for CNET.
The Art of Living: Jonathon is newer to the blogosphere. He’s a great writer and keeps things local. Check him out.
East-West Station: Kim is more than a “fat old Englishman out east.” He’s also a damn smart guy. I know because I never would have won so many bottles of vodka at Quiz Night were he not on my team. He’s married to a local, so he’ll be here a while.
It was kinda dull. Much of my experience was a less interesting, more disorganized version of last year.
I’ve been distracted. On a whim, I started learning Django (and by extension, the Python programming language), and the deeper I get into it, the more I’m enjoying it.
Before I left Dalian a month ago, I’d planned on spending my time (and hence, not my limited budget) plowing into Drupal and PHP, since that’s what we used for DalianDalian. It also seemed a logical follow to my efforts with XHTML and CSS.
What diverted me was Matt Waite’s blog post on learning Django. I followed the links, started playing, and ended up somewhere very different from where I intended to be. Such is life, I suppose.
Anyway, I’ve yet to build anything useful with Django, but I think I’m close. I’m six chapters into the Django Book, which I highly recommend (along with How to Think Like a Computer Scientist for fellow Python newbies).
Ultimately, I’m hoping this helps me do more of the kind of journalism I did at my old newspaper, covering education. I used to rummage through state databases on schools and demographics and test scores and teacher pay, turning it all into blobs of text. Mind you, I think they were very well formed blobs of text, but that’s not always the best thing to do with this kind of information.
Text is good for context and analysis, for presenting trends, for guiding a reader through a pile of numbers. But it’s worth letting people sift data on their own and presenting it in a way that makes doing so easy. Hopefully, Django will help me do that.
