JMSC

As I’m focussing on heritage preservation and development for my final project, perhaps in the form of a photo-essay, I decided to add to Wikipedia’s Soho entry (see History) Under the Discussion page, instead of the list of postings was a notice introducing WikiProject Hong Kong.

I have now joined the participants of the Hong Kong WikiProject responsible for raising the quality and expanding the reach of all entries about Hong Kong. I’m impressed at this further finessing of the function of the open-source encyclopaedia. This parallel wikiforum enables like-minded people to engage electronically on the deepening of information and sources crucial to the integrity of Wikipedia. It also encourages you to “Assess all Hong Kong-related articles with the new assessment criteria” with a view to further improving quality through internal checks.

In future, it will be interesting to see what comments are posted, if any, about my additions to the Soho site. It may help develop my thinking on my new media project. I can actually understanding how someone could find it quite compulsive adding to and editing pages on Wikipedia. There is definitely a sense of empowerment. However, I am reminded of what isky posted on her blog, that the World Wide Web has marvellous powers of distraction. It truly is sometimes difficult to get on with the more focussed tasks which compete for our attention day on day.

To what extent adding to Wikipedia is journalism really depends upon your definition of the term. Some, like Bernard Lo of Bloomberg TV, would say that journalism in its traditional form no longer exists as an industry, surpassed by a plethora of vocations related to the communications field. In that light, perhaps one could make an argument for Wikipedians acting as pseudo-reporters.

For me, it is far-fetched though. Much like the blogosphere, there is no consistency of treatment, nor comprehensive monitor for content in Wikipedia. The community of writers act out of self-interest in tandem with the desire to enlighten the world, thus as Rebecca pointed out, there are a disproportionate number of sci-fi and technology pages within. Merely researching and writing up findings does not a journalist make.

As an encyclopedia, I believe Wikipedia does achieve its purpose, and is one the way its founder’s mission to “distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language” (New Yorker) Knowledge is power, and Wikipedia advocates this in an innovative and dynamic way. Though massive (it has grown exponentially and is limitlessness), it is not unwieldy in Web form, and compares well against the traditional standard, The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wikipedia can be updated with ease, and thus cover topics related to breaking news, such as the North Korean nuclear test last summer. In fact, a special report on New Media in The Economist last April cited tests, topping that mentioned in Stacy Schiff’s article, that proved Wikipedia was more accurate on at 97% compared to 94% scored by its truly unwieldy forebear (tests conducted on common listings as main criteria).

There are, however, strong cases to be made for why Wikipedia should not be cited as an academic source, although astephens makes a good point that links to sources at the bottom of the page are a very good starting point for student research. Convenience often does not marry with reliability. The New York Times published an article to that very effect this week (following the Learning.Now story just cited) on a ban imposed at Middlebury College and the ensuing debate. What is for sure is that the very concept of an online, no holds barred access encyclopedia ignites controversy about the nature of what we hold to be true. Edit wars are just one manisfestation of this.

For the time being, it appears Wikipedians are on the crest, and there is nothing dam the deluge. N.B. Hot off the press, today’s SCMP front page story deals with the controversy of defamation in Wikipedia. Who do you sue?

I’ve decided to change my topic from race issues in Hong Kong to the heated debate about how do we balance development, urban renewal and heritage preservation? My particulas focus will be on the Central/Sheung Wan area.It is interesting to note that most heritage preservation websites cover North America. The concept of heritage preservation in Asia is still relatively new, due to the region’s turbulent history of recent decades and economic status on the ladder of development.Now in Hong Kong, members of the community are starting to focus their attention on what makes Hong Kong unique, 10 years after the Handover. The past year in particular has seen increasing media attention towards how Hong Kong will safeguard architectural and cultural identity amid underlying economic pressures, a dense population, and concerns about pollution. This was triggered most recently by unsuccessful demonstrations against the tearing down of the old Central Star Ferry piers.

Civic Exchange is an independent Hong Kong-based public policy think tank which seeks to promote civic education by providing objective and balanced information to the public concerning economic, social and environmental issues.http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/-/topics/environment/feed/ http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/-/topics/development/feed/ Global Voices needs no introduction to our JMSC community! I thought it’d be worthwhile to keep up with similar debates around the world.http://www.asiasource.org/culturalheritage/Developed by the Asia Society, this e-alert provides information on cultural, economic, social, historical, and political matters concerning Asia.
In addition, here’s an excellent discussion thread with contributions from all stakeholders, in particular architects, policy-makers:http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=356904

Hong Kong’s own South China Morning Post stands out from this group as it doesn’t provide a feed option. This newspaper appears to value the traditional business model over access, as all content is subscription-only; even then subscribers need to pay a fee to look up archive articles.

The New York Times wins for the most flashy feeds page, inundating the e-reader with 104 different options! The web team their certainly support the e-reader’s inclination to organise and individualise content.

I personally think the BBC News website is outstanding - it is as much an educational tool as a new station because of all the information options available. When it comes to relying upon RSS feeds, clearly you are more limited, though the one-liners leads push you to click back to the website anyway to read the story you’re interested in. From there you can follow the links to areas of interest. The International News feeds page offers 30-odd feed choices, but you can find variations as the BBC has 33 different language versions including BBC China. Most provide more limited feed selections, but watch out for upgrades in the future if you speak Ukrainian etc.

The HK Standard’s offering is limited to one feed option which gives you complete access to all the headlines for the daily edition. It’s actually an expedient way of keeping up with local news without navigating a website, and certainly easier than popping out to get the paper, and then thumbing through inky pages.

RSS feeds also clear the clutter of graphics and advertising on the webpage – this has its drawbacks though. Obviously if you are an advertiser with the publication, the last thing you’d want is for readers to bypass your carefully crafted and costly ads. It is possible for a reader to rarely visit the original news site, and thus all elements of branding and image become redundant in the cyber world’s quest the manage content.

However, the feeds only provide a summary glance at the day’s events, so you will have to click to enter the website anyway, though you mitigate the extra time clicking through pages till you find what you want.

Quite how the feeds tool will alter journalists’ way of doing things is hard to predict, though they might want to craft more catchy titles and leads to merit a click over the rest. This will be essential to maintain credibility with advertisers and sustain profits as e-readers migrate to aggregation engines.

As to whether the hard or soft copy will win out in the end, I believe it depends on individual needs and perspectives. There is something rather satisfying about picking up a broadsheet and thumbing, or fumbling, through the pages cover to cover. For photojournalists, this is their primary medium of expression, where you can be drawn to a story on the strength of the image alongside. In our pursuit of more and more information from more and more channels, news feeds have, for the time being, revolutionised the way we ‘suck’ in content.

I agree with J.D. Lasica that RSS technology will continue to evolve to better meet the reader’s needs. However, “After a couple of hours of subscribing to favorite feeds, your news grazing habits will be changed forever” is still questionable for me. Yes, it is a great tool to manage content from different pages, but I still like to click onto the IHT and SCMP websites first thing in the morning. Perhaps this loyalty will disappear in future, but only if My Yahoo and Google Reader truly do save precious time, rather than adding to the increasing deluge of information and thus multitasking that that is becoming synonymous with 21^st century modern living.

The information age as we know it was founded by Tim Berners-Lee with the creation of the World Wide Web. This web of information has been accelerated by the technological advances that have followed in its wake. The continuing implications of the Internet remain to be seen, but already the effects are far-reaching upon work, play and many other aspects of our lives.

Blogs, feeds, email groupings and webpage favourites have enabled us to employ the Net as a social tool and literally network in cyber-communities. These choices reflect the communities that interest us and that we belong to. We could end up operating in multiple identities, which can be viewed as positive or not. As budding journalists, one chief impact of the Internet is the so-called democratization of information. Thus news organisations no longer control and shape the news, rather it is an increasingly amorphous thing. Once in a while, solo bloggers can draw public attention to a concern that has an impact on the communities they live in.Someone also mentioned the importance of mindset; what we need above innate skill is the willingness to embrace innovation. When on the job-hunt, web skills will definitely give you an edge, though are often not directly stipulated.The field of webpage design is increasingly important as individuals, companies and organisations compete to have their offerings seen and remembered first.

I have been interested in the topic of racism and how it manifests itself within different societies particularly since coming to Hong Kong. While I’ve experienced racist bullying myself, I wonder where do we draw the line between overt racism and ignorant behaviour?

Hong Kong projects itself as a ‘world city,’ a cosmopolitan hub for tourism and financial services in Asia. But there seems to be an increasingly visible disconnect between this idealised image and the reality of a changing society.

Hong Kong’s Race Discrimination Bill passed last November was long overdue, despite ongoing pressure from the international community. Whilst it is an improvement, there remains the thorny issue of mainland Chinese immigrants. The law legislates against discrimination aimed at minority races, thus does not cover the derogatory treatment of people from the mainland which is pervasive.

The border that separates the SAR from the motherland has witnessed more balanced traffic between locals exiting and mainlanders entering. There continues to be much controversy in the wake of the PRC’s overturning of the right of abode rulings in 1999 and the Court of Final Appeal’s pronouncement in 2002 that children born in Hong Kong of mainland parents would be granted residency.

Most recently, we have seen pregnant women from the mainland embroiled in heated debate amid what some might consider draconian measures. How the ‘one party, two systems’ idea will pan out in the future remains to be seen; this will have great influence on the make-up of Hong Kong and how the world perceives it.

Therefore, my focus would be two-tier: to examine how effective the new bill is in protecting minorities; and shed light on the more murky prejudices that characterise the Hong Kong reception of their motherland ten years on.

Much of what Rebecca said about the impact of new media technologies on the news profession in class echoed the very enlightening lecture she delivered last November during her whirlwind visit to HK. That there is room for expansion onto the Net for new blood in the profession is a welcome view, though it is hard to second guess quite how online news media will evolve. I like the idea of being on the frontline though, as long as I am equipped with the necessary skills.

Having not heard of our guest speaker before, I was impressed by how authoritative a role Joi Ito has in the [global] Internet technologies community, and learnt a great deal. His insights on the nature of blogging from his extensive and cutting-edge experience was illuminating, and his passion made him particularly engaging. The idea of bloggers “break[ing] down barriers” in the delivery of news is one I’ve come across on numerous occasions, but his comments on the impact of blogging on human behaviour I found particularly meaningful: “When you give people a voice, many people become thoughtful. It has made my thoughts as well as my words a lot more responsible.”

Thus the Internet enables a truer, public democratisation of the issues that concern us. I would like to think that there is still much room for the conventional writer-journalist who is willing to adapt in light of the “trickle up or trickle down [impact of bloggers on] the mainstream media.”

For myself, I believe the Hong Kong news media are well-placed to feel and exploit the impact of new media technologies as the city serves as a regional hub for international publications. The territory itself also had a very vibrant media community, playing host to myriad publications like Apple Daily and The Hong Kong Standard. See also Raymond ’s far-reaching English translation news blog EastSouthWestNorth and comments on the evolution and design of HK news media. The local community are recognised as being quite technologically-savvy. The evolution of new media technologies is and will continue to influence Mainland China’s news culture greatly. Hong Kong’s unique position allows us to witness closely this development; it is an exciting prospect, and one that is definitely worth following - even getting caught up in.   

About Me:

I’m a 30-something Third Culture Kid who has lived in four countries, and travelled in two dozen more. Despite the extensive cultural experiences I’m a typical English monoglot, and not proud of it. (For anyone wanting to volunteer to improve my Mandarin, I’m all ears!) I’m a teacher by trade; having starting out in north London I ended up in one of HK’s international schools teaching English to 11-18 year olds. After eight years there I felt I was due for a change, so applied for the MJ programme with no clear idea of my future beyond it. So far, it’s been incredibly stimulating as well as challenging, and I fully expect more of the same in the New Media Workshop.  

Week 1 Thoughts:

It’s been made abundantly clear to me that without the skills to harness the Web and other media to a news organisation’s advantage, the budding journalist will find him or herself on a very low rung indeed. I wish I could have listened to Fang Wang speak personally (I was still interning in KL); she strikes me as a very focussed, savvy young woman who’s now in a position of considerable weight in international news. Lucky her! Her role in the organisation also speaks volumes about how the news media have had to adapt to the 24-hour cycle, make many more decisions about what constitutes a news story and how it should be presented and so on.

I agree with Moor and Jenkins - these are indeed exciting times to be entering the world of journalism, though fraught with challenges. In fact, I felt quite encouraged by Moor’s article. Perhaps the future for us rookies isn’t quite so bleak. However, I’d be interested to learn more about viable business models for newspapers in the digital age. While I’m trying to equip myself with multimedia know-how, I share the concern about the possible costs to news depth. To reach out to your readership using convergence technologies could result in more limited coverage of individual topics as there is only so much an individual reporter can do given daily deadlines. But true, the multimedia platform on the Web does allow readers a greater range in how to access the news, thus pandering to our desire to organise and individualise our content. On a more general point, perhaps the defining crux for the information generation is deciding what to read, watch, listen to, link to amongst the gamut available online.    

Another point which I keep coming across is the merging of news and entertainment: ‘infotainment’. I agree with Ron Jenkins’ fear (Newsweek International) that the future of news media as profitable companies may well be tied up in competing with other publishers to keep their audience entertained at the expense of hard news topics.

Blogging as a medium of expression is entirely new to my experience. I can see how it can become compulsive as it feeds into the common human desire to socialise and share ideas. Of course, as a channel for news it needs to be handled with care. On the Poynter site I was especially struck by the inversion of Jenkin’s argument in Alex Dering’s posting:

“… Take a blogger to lunch in order to understand the Web? How about a blogger take a journalist to lunch in order to understand journalism?”

More on Joi Ito and the first class to come…

Testing. Adding a link

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