Floating Island

After looking around our classmates’ del.icio.us pages, I subscribed to those of aiyahenator, ejong, radiocat and janeho. I also subscribed to a technorati feed of the tags “hongkong art” and a couple of flickr feeds for photo pools of Hong Kong’s art, street art, heritage, and music performances.

From these feeds, I picked up a couple of leads for stories related to my project on arts and culture in Hong Kong:

1. From radiocat’s del.icio.us feed, I picked up the Time blog posting on self-censorship in the press. This got me wondering if there has been similar self-censorship within the arts community. If so, is it more prevalent among or cultural organizations? What are the sensitive issues that have emerged over the past ten years in terms of art and censorship?

2. Also from radiocat’s link to the RTHK story in Ming Pao inspired me to consider its broader role as an arbiter of culture and taste. RTHK’s role within Hong Kong’s cultural policy could also be explored in this follow up article.

3. Flickr’s street art pool has only one photo of graffiti in HK, so I wonder whether this is representative of the lack of  actual street art in Hong Kong, and if so, why. Are the penalties too high? Is it due to the lack of an underground art culture in Hong Kong? I could also look into who the young street artists of Hong Kong are and how they see themselves in relation to the broader arts community.

This week, we are using tags and debating the pros and cons of this online filing system.

At first glance, tagging appears to involve complex and intricate procedures that can be intimidating to a newbie like me. Overall, I see it as a basic trade-off: I can make a sizable investment of time and effort now, in order to improve efficiency later on, or I can continue with my inefficient habits, which will make me less effective over the long term but won’t require that I learn anything new today.

This leads to a nagging concern over current tagging systems being superceded in the near future, so why bother to learn a system that may become obsolete? Weinberger revels in the perception that tagging “sticks it to the man” by diminishing traditional hierarchies of knowledge, which is seems like a contradictory impulse for a system that is supposed to help us organize information.

There also seems to be some debate as to what constitutes tagging. A recent Pew survey found that 28 percent of American internet users have engaged in tagging, but it fails to define what they counted as tagging. 28 percent seems like an improbably high result, especially compared to the reported 2.3 percent tagging rate among Chinese users (who generally tend to be younger and, in my view, more tech-savvy than American users). Again , there’s a lack of information on the methodology used in the China survey.

Technorati v. Google:

I searched the phrases “hong kong” “cultural policy” together in both Google and technorati. Google’s top result was the Centre for Cultural Policy Research here at HKU, which is great. Google’s top hits tend most towards educational and government institutions, .orgs, and news websites—very little from blogs.

In contrast, technorati’s results are all blogs, with only 39 hits (though somehow this shrank to 21 as I clicked through the results pages),. My own blog post from last week was ranked second, but most of the others were entirely irrelevant. Technorati doesn’t appear to filter out the craziness of the online world— my search pulled up a lot of identical rants against Bush. This is both an advantage and a drawback: nothing is censored, so you are guaranteed to get every blog post that includes your search terms. At the same time, most of it is useless, so the searcher still has to search within the results pretty extensively.

In the future, I would probably limit my use of technorati to keeping a pulse on the hot topics of the online world and what people are saying about them. But for searching on an esoteric subject, I didn’t find it to be very helpful.

Del.icio.us seems much more useful, but also a bit more complex. I’m sure it will be very useful to my work once I get over whining to myself over the steep learning curve involved and start adding more bookmarks.

This week, I created an entry on Wikipedia and lived to recount the experience.

To be honest, I’m utterly exhausted after travelling to India, getting sick and spending an insane amount of time putting together an entry on Hong Kong’s cultural policy. Hong Kong’s arts and culture scene is poorly represented in the wiki world, so I had to start from scratch.

During this experience, I didn’t really feel the drive and excitement of creating a new story that comes from doing journalism, nor did I feel the casual relaxation that comes with blogging. I was more like a careful researcher trying to avoid expressing a too blatant a point of view (wiki frowns on the POV), with my guard always up, as I’m hoping to avoid as much as possible the brutality of those wiki edit wars. Though I can totally see where the people Schiff describes are coming from– I already feel very protective about my work and would hate to see it get messed with. So far, only a minor edit has been made– a  kind soul has categorized the entry under Hong Kong culture.

In terms of where I see Wikipedia fitting in with what we have learned and read so far, it’s undoubtedly a valuable resource and also an unreliable one. I often turn to Wikipedia when I have no clue about a subject (the most recent examples being polio and crunk) but I can only trust the information as far as it provides a general guideline, or clue, so to speak. Afterwards, my thinking runs along the lines of, “well, Wikipedia says that crunk is … xyz” as opposed to thinking “crunk really is …xyz”

If I was looking for accuracy, I would probably prefer an Encyclopedia Brittanica, but that would require going to the library and flipping through pages. Usually I turn to Wikipedia just to satisfy some small curiousity on a topic that came up in the course of conversation, reading or television viewing. These are the kinds of subjects that don’t warrant the effort of going to the library, or even to my own bookshelves. So it’s not even trade off between accuracy and convenience, the choice is rather between ignorance and partial truths, and I disagree with Schiff’s characterization of this process as somehow embodying a “newly casual relationship to the truth.”

Which makes the Cohen piece on judicial citations to Wikipedia so baffling to me. Are the law clerks who write judicial opinions really being so lazy, as Professor Susstein surmises? Even if one can find relevant information on Wikipedia, it should be backed up with a confirmation from a more reliable source, especially before being cited in print. And if the lawyers start citing Wikipedia in court briefs, clients may well construe it as professional malpractice!

Wikipedia’s own standard is that every entry should have supporting references. However, due to the lack of staff/dedicated volunteers to enforce quality control, not every entry gets a full review for accuracy. As the responses to Carvin’s report on Middlebury pointed out, a good benchmark for more reliable entries is the inclusion of references and external links, and rather than banning Wikipedia from schools, students should be taught to develop the skills for evaluating, utilizing and improving the resource.

This is a preliminary list of websites and feeds that will be relevant to my new media project on cross-border art and cultural impacts since 1997:

1. The website of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department provides a braod array of official information on Hong Kong’s cultural offerings and its arts scene. It includes a page of press releases which I plan to visit frequently. I also think it may be useful to consider the local government’s arts and cultural policies since the handover and how the mainland fits into it.
2. Although the website of the Hong Kong Arts Festival lacks a feed option, I was able to subscribe to its e-mail newsletter. As the principal annual arts festival in Hong Kong, it usually features a number of prominent mainland productions and/or collaborations between mainland and Hong Kong artists.
3. The Virtual China blog often includes some interesting takes on Chinese art, film, and cultural issues, so I’ve subscribed to its feed to keep a broader perspective on art issues on the mainland.
4. The Hong Kong International Film Festival is still developing its site for this year’s event, but in the meantime I will look at trends over the last decade of the festival’s history. The HKIFF also began a blog last year, but it doesn’t include a subscription option and seems to have fallen by the wayside for the past several months.
5. Hong Kong has several institutions devoted to the promotion of China’s traditional arts and culture. I plan to look into these organizations more closely to chart any changes in their missions over the last ten years.
6. Then there are institutions that promote more alternative constructions of art, such as the Fringe Club and Para/Site. Interestingly, I found that last year there was a Shanghai Fringe Festival that was supported by the government of the HKSAR.

This week, we are engaging with RSS feeds and news readers to consider how the new forms of content delivery and organization will affect news reading and reporting habits.

Four News Feeds

First, we all signed up for Google Reader accounts and were asked to try out the news feeds of four fairly different (in the online sense) news organizations.

1. The New York Times has one of the best feed pages around, and easily the best of this bunch. On the home page, there are links to the RSS page at the bottom and lower right of the page. It seems most sites put their orange RSS links somewhere around the margins of the page—this makes it easy for the reader to scan and find.

NYT easily offers more than two dozen major categories of news feeds, and many of these offer sub-categories for more specific news within a given area, all offered on a single page. For example, You can subscribe to a feed for the NYT’s renowned science coverage, or you can choose a specific area of science news—in this case, “earth,” “nutrition,” or “space” news. In the Google Reader, I subscribed to the feeds that are relevant for my courses and projects this term: world business, asia pacific, technology, arts and the magazine.

Unfortunately, for such an advanced site, it doesn’t yet seem possible to subscribe to feeds by author or columnist, a feature that J.D. Lasica has been looking forward to for close to three years.

2. At first glance, the BBC’s Feed Factory is a bit hard to grasp. I was expecting something similar to the NYT feed page (which is similar to what I’ve seen from other news organizations), whereby all the feeds are listed in a straightforward mannerr. Instead, the BBC’s page gives the most prominent positions to the feeds for BBC promos and entertainment news. To get to the list of feeds, you have to go either to the “feed finder” (I expected this to be a search function) or to the small, pale link that’s overshadowed by the cartoon image of a woman saying “feed me.”

Once on the feed page, there are over a dozen categories listed alongside large colorful icons. Most of these categories seem to be geared away from hard news and analysis. Instead there’s stuff like entertainment, lifestyle, teens, kids, sports, weather. In order to see the feeds available under a category, it’s necessary to click on a link and go to a separate page. I chose to subscribe to the week at a glance news feed, as most of the other categories weren’t too interesting to me.

Overall, it seems the BBC site is trying to appeal to users who have no experience with RSS and may not even know what it is. But it goes about this in an odd way, employing childish graphics and replacing quality news options with lifestyle topics, yet not in a particularly user-friendly manner.

3. The Standard offers its news feeds in the most bare-bones manner: two links (one XML and one RSS) along the middle-right side of the home page. At least it’s easy to find, and there’s no need to choose specific feeds. One click and you’re signed up for everything.

It appears that the Standard sends out its feeds in a categorical order, though. When I first signed up, all of the articles near the top were property-related, while further down was a slew of sport stories.

I also noted that while the XML feed seems to work well, I had previously tried using the RSS feed in the NetNewsWire reader and got nothing.

4. Given the SCMP’s status as the world’s most profitable newspaper (on a per-subscriber basis), it’s quite disappointing that they are taking so long to invest in their future. I’ve looked through the site many times, always hoping that I just missed the feed link. But no, there’s no text news feed, only a podcast feed.

News Readers vs. Websites

News readers offer great convenience and flexibility for obtaining and organizing news content from a broad array of sources. Yet, I notice that when I read news on a reader, I tend to scan headlines more and perhaps read fewer stories from any one source than if I went to the website. This makes me better informed in a superficial way and less informed in a substantive way.

I still like to visit some websites regularly, such as NYT, because I’m familiar with the layout and I like to see the different ways in which stories are featured and given prominence. I also worry that, by becoming overly reliant on news feeds, I will miss out on some interesting stories that are not within my usual range of interests or subscriptions

Feeds Will Change the Way We Read

Feeds make me feel as if I should be reading the news constantly, on a portable device such as a pocket PC or blackberry. The news reader format seems well suited to smaller screens as well.

As Lasica noted, we are still awaiting a number of features that will further revolutionize the way we receive and read our news. Features that allow us to better organize our content, such as tags, could have a similar impact on news readers as Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web had on the internet.

Feeds Will Change the Way We Report

In the future, feeds may affect reporting and presentation of news. As feeds take off, news organizations may place less emphasis on creating distinctive online content, and instead focus more on supplying news to news readers (the programs not the people). Perhaps it will open the way for more revenue as companies find a way to charge for feeds. And ultimately, they may need to find a way to insert advertising into the feeds to maintain profitability. We haven’t seen too much of this yet, but feeds may offer greater flexibility and control for advertisers as well.

I haven’t given much thought to how feeds would change my reporting and writing. It may force me to write catchier headlines, in hopes of attracting more interest in the story below. Or I may simply try to write more informative headlines and leads, aware that many readers will not read beyond the first few lines.

I’d like to examine the role of artistic and cultural exchanges between Hong Kong and mainland China in the 10 years since 1997.

We’ve seen increasing collaboration in some areas, such as film production, and also an increase in stage and musical performances from mainland China. I expect that with the coming handover anniversary, there will be even more performances to commemorate the historical milestone.

Recent years have also witnessed greater mainland participation in Hong Kong’s major arts festival, the international film festival and in the literary festival.

Books and other publications that are banned in China are readily available in Hong Kong.

On Hollywood Road, one can find art galleries (such as this one) featuring the work of contemporary artists from the mainland’s avant-garde alongside antique shops showcasing the ancient treasures of China.

I would guess that today there are more students from mainland China in Hong Kong’s art institutions than 10 years ago.

Who are the audiences for these cultural products? How do they view the interaction between Hong Kong and the mainland? And how do artists treat the issue of identity in relation to Hong Kong and the mainland?

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Professional exchange

Another idea would be to look at other types of professional exchanges between HK and mainland China, such as among journalists, lawyers and teachers. For example, I know JMSC conducts trainings for mainland journalists, and the Law Society organizes study trips and exchanges for Hong Kong lawyers in China. HKU often runs study trips to schools in Guangdong. What are we learning from each other?

Chief among the concerns of our fellow journalism students is the implication of new media on our careers– how we will get (and keep) our jobs in the future. Will we have to become editors instead of reporters?

We still do not know if there are viable business models out there for the new media, and the pace of change can be overwhelming. Our future is a world of “possibilities and uncertainties.”

Perhaps ours is not unique among the industries in feeling the impact of technology, but since we are writers, we may be better at expressing our concerns and incorporating them into the public discourse.

Many of us look forward to taking part in building the Web 2.0 and beyond, yet there is also some dismay that Hong Kong’s local media are not keeping up with the pace of change, and that China’s repressive media environment means that bloggers risk losing out on the full potential offered by the new media.

The internet is exhilarating but can also become tiring. There are so many voices out there that it causes us to worry about how to sift the true from the false and where to place our trust. And as young journalists, we still need to devote a substantial amount of time and energy to the fundamentals– quality reporting and writing.

The new media also places added stresses on journalists to be “always on” within the 24/7 news cycle.

But our reality is not always online. Yarson made an important point to remind us of the technical limitations of the new media– it’s not always accessible or convenient, and reading online is tiring on the eyes.

Here’s a recent example of how traditional print organizations are becoming more savvy in using the web to their advantage (via Editor & Publisher):

The San Francisco Chronicle recently broke a story of the city’s mayor’s affair with the wife of his campaign manager. (SF’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, is fairly young, photogenic, and recently divorced, so he gets a lot of media attention). Anyways, this piece highlighted the ongoing debate on breaking news online vs. waiting for the next day’s paper, plus the increased productivity offered by online editions (echoing points made at the recent FT workshop on campus).

Here’s what Peter Negulescu, the Chronicle’s vice president for digital media, had to say:

“Even two years ago, there would have been one article and there would have been a great debate about posting it on the Web the night before,” he said. “Today, we push it out to the Web site, it gets picked up by people like Drudge and Google News and the next day people are commenting on it. The press conference comes, we have raw feed of the video and the amount of content we can package around it is huge.”

The Chronicle’s website, SFGate.com, got a record number of hits for breaking the story. Its latest coverage on the affair and its aftermath can be found here.

During our first class, I looked up Joi Ito’s Web ahead of his appearance. As I was scrolling through his recent blog posts I found myself distracted by his diary of a vegan diet. Now of course, Joi was not coming to our class to discuss how giving up meat and dairy products has changed his life. He came to discuss topics that were relevant to us as budding journalists—the new media landscape, the role of bloggers, and the copyright model represented by his work with Creative Commons.

Nevertheless, my digression highlights one of the great powers and perils of the internet– that it’s great at drawing our attention away from central narratives and towards the peripheries. One of the best illustrations of this phenomenon is Boing Boing—when I was introduced to the site in 2001 I never imagined would become the the most favorite website of all websites (according to technorati).

As far as journalism goes, the internet is a great equalizer. It’s no longer necessary to own a business with a printing press and staff to create a successful publication, nor do we have to convince these publications to hire us in order to get our voices out. In his article, “Take a Blogger to Lunch,” Keith Jenkins describes how the new media environment erodes the elevated position enjoyed by the mainstream news media (MSM, as Jenkins calls it), who may need to give up part of their gatekeeping function to gain credibility among their new media audiences.

Online media also allows us, as audiences, to decide what content is important and tailor our viewing accordingly. For example, I’ve used YouTube to catch up on network news from the U.S. along with a friend’s made-in-Hong Kong home movies. In a sense my choices reflect the communities that I’m part of—personal, political, professional, and so on.
Personally, when it comes to getting news, I haven’t much distinguished print from online media—what matters to me is the content, not the form. (Though I notice that I do tend to read more when I have a print version in front of me). I started reading NYT and other news online from China in 1998. Basically there wasn’t any other option at the time. It was online or nothing. Nowadays, with most other news that I read—WSJ, FT, IHT— even if I have to pay for an online subscription, it’s far more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than reading print editions.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me that online and print editions have been treated so distinctly within the news organizations that run them. I naively thought that content from the newspaper simply made its way online just with the help of some IT folks, and that online editions generally reflect print, plus or minus a few extra features. I still just want to read the news and don’t use online-only features very much, with the exception of archives, which are indispensable.

As it turns out, online journalism can represent a distinct career path, as illustrated by the Fang Wang, assistant news editor for FT.com. Or it can merge with the traditional work of a print journalist. Last week, when Newsweek’s Ron Javers spoke at the JMSC about journalism and new media, he noted that today’s writers are often asked to prepare shorter versions of their articles for the web and to make television appearances to discuss and publicize their stories. For student journalists, the new requirements may pose a bit of a challenge. Unlike our more experienced counterparts, we cannot afford to learn the nuts and bolts of traditional media first and leave the new media for a future date– we’ve got a much steeper learning curve, simultaneously trying to learn web and video skills while not sacrificing the quality of our reporting and writing. The added stress of this new proposition is palpable in the comments section of Anthony Moor’s “Go to the web, young journalist!”

And still, there’s a lot to be said for the credibility bestowed by traditional news media. It would be a dream come true for many of us to be able to develop content online and get paid for it, but there are no shortcuts to training and experience. It’s hard for me to imagine any effective substitute for the type of skills that are developed in the classroom and the newsroom. And print still seems to carry an aura of superiority among journalists—I guess there’s no substitute for seeing one’s name in print.