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 have this arrangement with the rest of my family whenever an election rolls around: In exchange for researching every candidate and initiative on the ballot, I get six votes. It’s not exactly six votes, we tend to hash things out via email and such, but for the most part, it’s my job to decide what my parents and siblings do in the polling booth.
But this year I’m really undecided. I never thought it would happen to me. I’ve become one of those fickle people interviewed on local news a week before a major election who just shrugs. In other words, I’ve become my family.
Anyway, China came up in the Democratic debate held on Dec. 4 in Iowa. I figure a candidate’s take on China is a good measure of how they’ll will deal with the rest of the world, because
We haven’t gone to war with China, but suddenly we’ve noticed it has a military
It’s an easy target politically, but not necessarily the right one
It’s not (directly) involved in the War on Terror or Iraq
In other words, China is complicated. And so it’s worth hearing how people who want to run the biggest economy and the biggest military propose we approach the biggest country with the fastest growing economy.
Stan Abrams of China Hearsay did the legwork and pulled the China-related quotes from the debate transcript (full pdf here). Check out what they said in three parts:
It would seem, to my eyes, that too many people acting like journalists is a good problem to have. The more eyes and ears on a subject, generally speaking, the more information likely to come out. Not all will be credible, or thoughtful, or useful, but the odds are better that facts will find their way to the surface as more people, professionals or otherwise, dig in.
David Hazinski, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Georgia, disagrees with this in a column published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Supporters of “citizen journalism” argue it provides independent, accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don’t provide. While it has its place, the reality is it really isn’t journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong probability of fraud and abuse. The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.
Put aside that regulating who gets to report and publish flies the face of the First Amendment. Congress can’t, and the media certainly can’t. So arguing that either should sounds a bit pointless. But hold off on that for a moment. (Or, if you really want a blow-by-blow fisking, read Dan Gillmor’s take).
Let’s consider what Hazinski sounds like he’s really advocating:
Where there are no journalists
Before you start griping that blogs are going to take CNN down a peg (and I’m not griping about that at all), consider what it’s like when your CNN is CCTV, when your AP is Xinhua. Remember the Chongqing Nail House? Or the PX plant in Xiamen? Not a whole lot of coverage there in China Daily.
Now think about countries that don’t even have that much news. Heard much out of Africa lately?
When you actually want to find out in countries that aren’t overflowing with media, that don’t have 24-hour cable networks following Larry Craig into the bathroom and checking into where Hillary Clinton is getting her campaign money (as they should), places that only make headlines when they get wiped out by tsunamis, who else is out there?
Us and Them
Underlying Hazinski’s rhetoric are two stagnant myths that get trotted out far too often when old media starts taking swings at new media. First, that there is an easily defined thing called “a journalist,” that this thing is easily wrapped in plastic and shipped around the world where it will absorb information without prejudice and send it back to headquarters unscathed. The limits of who or what can be rightly called a journalist are defined by a paycheck and a press pass. This myth says that what’s above the byline counts more than what’s under it.
But journalism is about doing more than being. It’s about reporting, and writing, and editing and producing—everything we want to see in a good piece of news. It’s about finding and sharing information.
The second myth is that we all want to produce and consume the same thing. Criticism of citizen journalism so often seems to assume that bloggers and podcasters and YouTubers all want to replace the media model that has existed since Ben Franklin started having gender issues and writing letters-to-the-editor as Silence Dogood.
More more more
There is plenty of ink and TV coming out of Beijing and Shanghai. Foreign coverage abounds, for good and obvious reasons. Much of it is excellent.
But China is huge. There is no feasible way for any single news agency, or even the combined efforts of that agency and all the wires it subscribes to, to hit everything. There’s just too much.
There’s lots of opportunity for content that hasn’t gotten past the committees that run big TV stations. But because of low cost of this stuff, I can create new content that goes into new areas, and I don’t need to clone CNN.
Yes, a lot of what gets printed on The Internets is crap. Much of it isn’t journalism and doesn’t pretend to be. As the Google guys would say, this is a search problem. And I sure as hell won’t object to more information, more dialog and more engagement, especially in places like China. Isn’t that what we, who have the audacity to call ourselves journalists, want from the public anyway? Time to study up, professor.
