To help foreign media confront the challenges posed by covering the Beijing Olympics, the International Federation of Journalists has teamed up with Play the Game, a non-profit democracy advocacy organization working in global athletic coverage, to produce a series of helpful tools for reporters on a new website — Play the Game for Open Journalism. The aids include an online discussion forum and a series of background and tips for reporting in China. Most impressive,......

In this week's edition of Opinionist, we present to you an excerpt of the speech made by Hong Kong journalist Ching Cheong made at the Society of Publishers in Asia's awards dinner on the 19th anniversary of the June 4 incident. The senior writer of the Singapore-based Straits Times was detained by Chinese authorities in April 2005 for over 1,000 days on charges of spying for Taiwan. In this speech, Ching Cheong spoke at length......

Xinhua has an interesting opinion piece about the recent unbanning on mobile phones and computers in Cuba. First, the title of the article: 从免于匮乏的自由开始 meaning "Starting with the freedom from want". The political significance of the phrase "freedom from want" comes from Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union address, and comes, as we say nowadays, bundled with three other freedoms: speech and expression, religion, and fear. After reviewing history, the author then begins to......

They did it last month, and they did it again this time. A second trip organised by Beijing for a closed group of journalists (from Reuters, ABC News, and France's Le Point, among others) to Xiahe, Gansu, has been disrupted by a group of between 15 and 30 young monks who burst out of a building at the L*br*ng Monastery, demanding for human rights, freedom and the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet. From The......

Cyber dissident Wang Dejia was arrested for "subverting state secrets" (what else?), which means penning too many articles critical of the government. Some of those critical essays pertained to the upcoming summer Olympics:In recent months, Wang also gave an interview to the Epoch Times, a media group backed by the banned sect F@lun G0ng, in which he claimed the Olympics would exacerbate the sufferings of Chinese people and leave them "living like dogs and pigs."......