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1 comment : April 9th, 2008 : News, multimedia, projects, roadside blogging
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.
Sources (rss):
China Digital Times: Tibet
Items tagged Tibet in my del.icio.us feed and in Rick’s feed
Also, here’s my Google shared items, which is filtered to only included Tibet-related posts in the pipe.
Let me know if there are more sources I should add.
1 comment : March 20th, 2008 : News, projects
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.
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.
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.
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.
1 comment : March 12th, 2008 : News, projects
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:
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:
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?
2 comments : February 22nd, 2008 : News, projects
This might sound odd coming from someone learning Django, but bear with me. Kevin Anderson of Strange Attractor posed an interesting question the other day:
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.
It doesn’t even really have to be Drupal. It could be Wordpress, or Django. Sean Blanda points to a list of magazine-style themes for Wordpress, and just ported his own college paper to Wordpress MU. See where this is going? (Django’s newsworthiness, I think, needs no elaboration.)
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.
Other Drupal-powered sites to check out: New York Observer, the Miami Hurricane (and explainer video), and DalianDalian.*
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.
Leave a comment : February 6th, 2008 : News, projects
I’m leaving Dalian. And China.
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:
And of course: DalianDalian.com. It really does have the best Dalian map you’re likely to find. Thank Alex for building it.
So long Dalian. Thanks for all the fish.
7 comments : January 29th, 2008 : projects, roadside blogging, self-indulgence, the Dalian life
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.
2 comments : January 29th, 2008 : projects, roadside blogging, self-indulgence
Seoul is a lovely place. Probably. But for the past week, it’s also been an unbearably, wretchedly, can’t-feel-my-face, my-hands-shouldn’t-be-that-color cold kind of place. Really, it hurts to go outside.
So, if such a thing is possible, I’m spending more time than usual in front of my laptop, which does have the side benefit of warming my hands on it’s overheating core duo. Ah, technology.
What that means for you, dear reader, is that I’m compulsively hitting reload on the social networking sites where I now have more friends than I do in what an online-gamer ex-girlfriend of mine referred to as RL. Should you be trying to find me in either realm, here’s a few places to start:
And if none of those work for you, feel free to shoot me an email: eyeseast at gmail
Leave a comment : January 3rd, 2008 : projects, roadside blogging, self-indulgence
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:
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?
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.
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.
And that’s OK. Not everything is interesting to everyone. I don’t really keep up on what’s happening with the latest US-China trade talks, but I’m glued to Times’ Choking on Growth series. And when I feel like going deeper, there’s Shanghaiist, or Responsible China, or AfricaBeat, or China Law Blog. I shouldn’t even have to say this at the end of 2007, but seriously, where else am I getting what Global Voices is producing? Or Danwei? Or ESWN?
Consider what Robert Scoble told Thomas Crampton the other day:
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.
4 comments : December 19th, 2007 : News, projects
Dalian is not the easiest place to stay on top of news. National news, sure, that’s everywhere, but local news? Not so much, at least not in English. About six months ago, a few of us here started working to fix that.
The result thus far is here: DalianDalian.com. Last week I applied for a Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant to fund the project, explaining it this way:
DalianDalian.com is a hyperlocal, community-driven site that will provide news, information and ways to connect for people living in Dalian, China. The city is home to six million people and a growing foreign population, divided geographically and linguistically among an urban center, rural suburbs and special districts. DalianDalian will use geographical search and integrated social networking to build links within and among this city’s disparate communities.
China’s second-tier cities are experiencing a boom in foreign investment and becoming more attractive to expatriate communities. For newcomers, the first year is often trial and error, full of horror stories of people living on instant noodles because they can’t find decent restaurants, of missed opportunities, of wasted time and money. When people arrive, there is no easily accessible, frequently updated source of information about the city.
Much of what can be found is scattered among blogs and forums, passed haphazardly by word of mouth, or in Chinese. Large media organizations rarely noticed Dalian until a few weeks ago, when the city hosted the World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos” conference, and those that did come have since disappeared. But Dalian is being discovered: Intel is moving in, and the city is already renowned as an outsourcing hub, hosting IBM, Dell, HP and local firms. There is a growing need for people here learn about their community, to connect, to find out what is going on. Nothing currently available fulfills that need.
The site is being built in Drupal and will feature databases, maps, forums, and wikis. It will host and aggregate local blogs, sharing ad revenue with contributors to give everyone who joins a stake in the site. It will integrate existing web2.0 applications to build on and localize those social networks. Wherever possible, information will be posted in English and Chinese.
Eventually, we believe this model of an online, multilingual, interactive site could be adapted to China’s other fast growing second- and third-tier cities.
Unfortunately, the Knight Foundation wasn’t as enthused about the project as the rest of us are. The upshot is that we open-source software and content aggregation technology have reached a point where it’s possible to build quite a bit with little more than knowhow and spare time (working on getting more of both). Everyone doing this is a volunteer, each with our own reasons, each bringing a different skill set. It’s a fun project, and we’re trying to keep it that way.
The crew so far: Alex of China Webmasters, Rick of Panda Passport, Patrick of Lingua Nostra.
Questions? Contact me (eyeseast at gmail.com) or one of the other guys listed above and we’ll help out. Promise.
2 comments : October 30th, 2007 : projects, the Dalian life
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