So where does news aggregation get in the way of original reporting? Nieman Journalism Lab took a look at one big story – the attack on Google in China – and analysed its treatment by various news organisations. A spreadsheet shows the full results (download file at this link).
[Jonathan Stray] I chose a single big story and read every single version listed on Google News to see who was doing the work. Out of the 121 distinct versions of last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China, 13 (11 per cent) included at least some original reporting. And just seven organisations (six percent) really got the full story independently.
Google’s head of public policy and government relations pushed the ‘don’t be evil’ line at last night’s Amnesty International social media event, with emphasis on user power and responsible company behaviour.
Also speaking were the Guardian’s digital media research editor, Kevin Anderson; Annabelle Sreberny, professor of global media and communication at SOAS; and author and blogger Andrew Keen: who spoke from the US via an iPhone held up to the mic by the event chair, BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones.
“[A] very important thing to understand about the way our business operates is that our users choose to use it,” Pointer later told Journalism.co.uk.
“We don’t have a contract with our users that ties them into our services. They haven’t invested a lot of money in our software packages.
“The way we keep our users is by continuing to provide good, leading edge innovative services: they’re free at the click of a mouse to choose an alternative to Google.”
Providing valuable services for users keeps the search giant – which owns YouTube as well as running a host of other products – on its toes, she said.
Improving the transparency of the recently launched social media application Google Buzz was one such reaction to user complaints, she added.
When the company realised improvements could be made, they were implemented, she said: “that’s something we did within hours and not days.”
While Pointer argued that no user information was ever revealed before an individual went through the Buzz set-up process, she said it had been necessary to make changes to the visibility of the user controls.
The addition of Buzz to the Google Dashboard allowed even greater user control over settings, she argued.
Two of the four Chinese journalists are British citizens, and they already have “inferior” terms and conditions to other journalists at the Financial Times, it was claimed by the NUJ today.
The National Union of Journalists Financial Times chapel is threatening to ballot for action, if plans are not reversed.
The NUJ chapel at the Financial Times voted unanimously – at a meeting attended by over 80 members – to demand that the threat of the redundancies be lifted.
“We condemn the outrageous treatment of journalists on FT Chinese. We demand no redundancies on FT Chinese and that the journalists be placed on the same terms and conditions as the rest of FT editorial. It is unconscionable that the FT is sending FT Chinese journalists into harm’s way. We will ballot for industrial action if these demands are not met,” said a spokesperson from the NUJ office branch.
One of the FT Chinese staff wrote to colleagues: “It was a tremendous shock to the entire team. This reminded us of a very old Chinese saying: ‘kill the donkey after it has done its job at the mill’. The best equivalent in English I can think of is ‘kick down the ladder’.”
A email sent to FT staff on behalf of the NUJ chapel, said it “was shocked but not surprised to hear about the Chinese journalist situation”.
“This is no longer the FT that we all joined. The FT used to be a place of compassion, where people were looked after and, in return, gave the job their all.
“Now there are job cuts while new hires are ongoing, constant pressure from bosses to get more in a shrinking paper, filing for the web for ft.com and blogging, and yet no personal support in return. This new FT is not the great place to work of the past. The end result will be lack of commitment to the paper, which will, eventually, show up in the quality of the end product.
The Financial Times told Journalism.co.uk it did not have a comment to make at this point.
“It may not quite be the Fourth Estate as in the Western press but a form of ‘watchdog journalism’ exists in China,” says this interesting piece looking at the growth of and challenges to investigative journalism in China.
The article takes a look at those organisations carrying out investigations, the help/hindrance of the internet, whether investigative journalists are chasing the right stories and what price they might pay for their work.
“It’s no secret that China’s mild-infatuation with Africa has only been increasing over the last decade,” writes Jonathan Gosier at AppAfrica.
“If it’s any indicator, the first all Chinese publication in Botswana suggests that things show no sign of slowing. The paper, called The Oriental Post will feature largely Chinese content with a handful of pages written in English. Botswana has between 5,000 and 6,000 Chinese residents living among the total population of 1.8 million.”
According to Beatblogging.org, the Globe and Mail featured five photos that all originally appeared on Twitter as part of its main story yesterday on riots in China.
The images were posted by Chinese citizens using the service and picked up by Reuters – the Globe and Mail took them from the agency’s service and attributed both Twitter and Reuters.
An example of, writes Beatblogging.org, news worthiness overriding photographic quality (the pictures are taken on mobile phones); and the importance of curation as a skill for journalists and editors (Reuters will have had to go through many photos before finding these images).
What’s more it shows the ability of social media and online communities to break through the great Chinese firewall:
“Rather than fear social media and other emerging Web technologies, news organizations should embrace these new technologies. In this case, the Globe and Mail was able to print five incredible photos that illustrate the upheaval and deadly violence in China. These photos would not be possible without social media, and the world would be poorer without these photos.”
“The scope and reach of the criminal offense of bribery (受贿罪) has never been clear in China. But the lines become even murkier when the charge is applied to one of the country’s most nebulous professions: journalism. Are Chinese journalists ‘government officials’ or ’state personnel’ to whom stiffer penalties should apply? Or are they performing ordinary service jobs outside the purview of the Criminal Law on bribery involving state officials?” David Bandurski asks in a China Media Project blog post.
The Telegraph’s Peter Foster writes: “In an article headlined ‘Who is spinning the propaganda?’, Patrick Whiteley, an Australian columnist for the paper [China Daily], attacks The Telegraph for ‘constantly labeling’ Chinese government initiatives as propaganda.”
“This is factually incorrect,” Foster responds. “When The Telegraph writes about Chinese health reforms or its plans to green the economy, as I have on this blog and in the pages of the newspaper, the word ‘propaganda’ is nowhere to be found.”
“[T]he tension between technology and outright repression – the availability of satellite television, the use of the internet as impetus for growth and economic modernization – has rendered obsolete the old methods of press control and suppression of information such as media nationalization and overt censorship.
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“In China, which now has more than a quarter billion online users, self-censorship is enforced through government rules and regulations that guide Internet service providers about what news can be posted and who can post it (…) In every country following the Chinese model, internet access has been severely restricted or the plug pulled entirely during periods of potential social unrest.”
While the US’ ranking in terms of imprisoned journalists is low, the country’s actions have ‘a disproportionate impact’ on the rest of the world. With a new administration comes new hope for global press freedom, Bernstein adds.
“President Barack Obama must recognise that whenever the United States fails to uphold press freedom at home or on the battlefield, its actions ripple across the world. By scrupulously upholding press freedom at home, by ending the practice of open-ended detentions of journalists, and by investigating and learning from each instance in which the US military is responsible for the death of a journalist, Obama can send an unequivocal message about the country’s commitment to protecting press freedom. These policies might accelerate declines in the numbers of journalists killed and imprisoned. They will certainly make it much harder for governments worldwide to justify repressive policies by citing the actions of the United States.”
Barack Obama's election victory named top news story of 2008 in Associated Press' annual poll, voted for by US editors and news directors.
Oil prices, the Beijing Olympics and Mumbai terror attacks all feature in the list. Full story...
