As the catastrophe and media blackout in Burma continues, coverage of the Wenchuan quake in China has taken centre stage.
While pictures and information on Burma are scarce, the international media has been given a free hand on the ground in Sichuan province, perhaps as natural disasters offer an unrivalled opportunity for the government to show itself in action.
Western media has produced some moving accounts of the tragedy as well as some more critical pieces on how the government has handled the rescue effort.
In the Guardian, Naomi Klein reports disgruntled parents lamenting the collapse of their children’s schools, and Tania Branigan quotes claims of corruption and misuse of funds.
Unsurprisingly, coverage here has primarily been on the rescue effort, the suffering and on Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao’s visits to quake-hit areas.
Domestic media has focused on the Party’s action plan and prominently featured press briefings detailing the government’s response, as well as making full use of photo opportunities for Party leaders.
Wen seems to have become the human face of the Party’s disaster relief efforts. He is visible in the same way that he was during the winter snow disaster; where he personally visited the gridlocked Guangzhou train station to address stranded spring festival travellers.
Thursday’s China Daily featured a picture of him holding two forlorn looking girls by the shoulder and quoted him as saying: “I am grandpa Wen Jiabao. You must hold on, child! You will be saved.”
China Daily has focused on the human cost and survivors’ tales, running capped-up front-page headlines “MAGICAL MOMENTS,” and RESCURERS RACE AGAINST TIME”.
Like the snow disaster, a lot of prominence is being given to donors’ generosity and volunteer rescue efforts (including those of foreigners on the ground) as China again attempts to present a united front.
However, the New York Times carries an excellent article asking why the government has accepted aid from Japan, Taiwan and Singapore but rejected offers from others.
Despite the huge mobilization of the army, the troops lack the necessary heavy lifting and drilling equipment to dig for survivors.
Such shortcomings seem to be going unnoticed amongst the scramble to present a front of national unity, and few here are asking why professionals from the West are being told to stay away.
According to China Media Project (CMP), critical coverage of the quake has apparently been banned by an edict discouraged by one of numerous directives intended to stop the spread of malicious rumours stories that may show the authorities in a bad light.
However stories like this, on the poor structural integrity of the schools that have collapsed, seem to have passed unnoticed.
CMP also runs a translation of another editorial by Southern Metropolis Daily editor Chang Ping. Chang highlights the dubious nature of the law on spreading false rumours in the light of the public’s overwhelming demand for information regarding the quake.
The law has came to the fore after a number of false rumours also surfaced in chatrooms and forums alleging that the authorities had somehow been warned that the quake was coming but suppressed the information, it would have perhaps been easier to dispel some of these myths quickly if the ever present spector of the authroities didn’t loom large and automatically make people suspicious of any news that suggests underhand activity on their part.
It will be interesting to see if the commercial media will begin receiving pressure to avoid critical reporting in the coming days when fewer survivors turn up and locals face the grim task of moving the dead and contemplating rebuilding their towns and homes and lives.
That will be a time for much reflection - and a lot of reflection may lead to some touchy questions.
Tags: army, Burma, Chang Ping, China, CMP, earthquake, Guangzhou, Guangzhou train station, Japan, media blackout, Naomi Klein, Sichuan, Singapore, spring festival, Taiwan, Tania Branigan, The Guardian, the New York Times, Wen JiabaoLast week’s launch of Twitter in Japan is showing early signs of success, reports ReadWriteWeb.
The new version was born when it was noticed that a significant percentage of Twitter usage was originating from Japan, despite the service being in English.
Now the dedicated Japanese version has been launched many sites are predicting an explosion of Twitter in the country.
Twitterlocal shows that Tokyo already has the highest usage of any city - almost three-times higher than second place location San Francisco.
Google Trends supports Twitterlocal statistics, as its stats show: Japan as the region with the highest overall usage, Japanese cities make up the top three globally and the Japanese language is the most prevalent across the service.
An interesting difference in the new version was the inclusion of ’some commercial experimentation’ by Twitter. The Japanese service carries advertising media from two clients. The move has been interpreted by many of a sign of things to come for the rest of the service.
Tags: google, Japan, San Francisco, service carries advertising media, TokyoJapan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun papers are pooling their resources on a new website that will feature news and editorials from the three rivals side-by-side.
The idea behind the Aratanisu site, according to a release on the Yomiuri site, will let readers ‘rediscover the differences in coverage and editorial stance of the three leading papers’.
The site aims to attract 4 million page views per month intially, The Japan Times reports, and become profitable by its third year. English-language content could also feature on the site in the future, the Times writes.
Tags: Asahi Shimbun, Japan, Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, The Japan Times, The Times, Yomiuri ShimbunIt’s hard to feel sorry for a newspaper company that boasts sales of eight million for its morning and four million for its evening editions, so when Atsushi Sato took to the stage at the Beyond the Printed Word conference, in Dublin today, to say that his company’s mobile sites were suffering and that newspaper circulations were down, there weren’t too many tears shed.
Sato, deputy manager of the digital division of Japan’s Asahi Shimbum newspaper company, told delegates that the Golden Age for mobile news sites, in Japan, was on the way out.
Most of delegates are still waiting for mobile news in their respective markets to move out of the primeval swamp and climb into a clattering carriage marked ‘destination: the Gold Age of Mobile News’, so it was something of a surprise to hear that the problems that rancour some in Europe and are keep their mobile operations down to a very minimum are the very same reasons, according to Sato, that the Japanese Golden Age is coming to an end.
And what’s the problem? Why the mobile operators.
Sato said that the machinations of shifting price tariffs amongst the three mobile companies that run the Japanese market - NTT Docomo (53 per cent market share), VIDDI (30 per cent) and Softbank (17 per cent) had caused many Japanese to switch operators and thus break the subscriptions through which they pay for access to mobile news sites.
He added that operators had been developing free content portals, which had been deflecting more and more traffic away from the paid-for services, and operators were also, effectively, blocking links to his paid-for sites with their portals.
The reticence of young people to pay for online content and people viewing free web pages designed for PC viewing on mobiles was also adding to the problems.
Sato did, however, outline the strategy that has brought Asahi such great success. The first mobile site, Asahi NikkanSports, was launched in 1999. It now boasts 700,000 to 800,000 subscribers.
The company’s strategy was to then spin similar satellite sites off the successful site, using its own content and that gleaned through partnerships, then link and promote from the original.
So spawned - amongst others - Asahi Lifeline news, for emergency and traffic news, using 15-second video stories, Nikkan Geino for entertainment news and a site dedicated to supplying electronic books and comics.
Asahi Shimbum operates 12 mobile websites, he added, with around one million subscribers paying monthly for access to one of the sites - with each site being run by a staff of six.
This contributes to the digital division of Asahi Shimbum making $33 (US) per year - a whopping one per cent of total company sales.
Oh, how the other delegates yearned for his millions-of-mobile-dollars problems…
Tags: Asahi Shimbum, Atsushi Sato, Dublin, electronic books, Europe, free web pages, Japan, mobile site, NTT Docomo, online content, paid-for services, similar satellite sites, Softbank, United States, USD, VIDDI
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