Results tagged “journalism”

The Press Freedom Index, an annual ranking of countries by Reporters Without Borders about their press freedom records, was published recently. Surprise surprise, China ranks one of the lowest on the list.

Yes, the rest of the article clarifies what they actually meant... but what can we say? We're easily amused by the things we find on China Daily.

It's a sad, sad day for economics news. One of our favorite business publications is now shuttering its doors as Dow Jones & Co. tries to reshuffle its properties - the Far Eastern Economic Review. According to their site, “the Far Eastern Economic Review will cease publication in December so opinion and commentary resources from Asia can be expanded across all Dow Jones properties. Unfortunately, despite several attempts at invigorating the brand, the REVIEW’s continued losses in advertising revenue and readers is now unsustainable.” FEER was first launched in 1946. Most of its content will now be continued through The Wall Street Journal Asia.

Wow. According to Thomas Crampton and the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents' Club, somebody out there is targeting journalists with emails containing malicious viruses.

The Global Post is currently featuring an interactive online exhibit that portrays an "intimate look at China's migrant workers." Besides stories and pictures, they also have video slideshows and audio translations of actual migrant workers' thoughts.

Shanghai-based journalist Paul French's latest book is one that ought to excite all you ol' Shanghai history buffs (and press nostalgists as well) - an examination of the convulsive history of the China press corps between the 1820s and leading up to the revolution of 1949.

After nearly two months of being detained in North Korea, Asian-American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling will allegedly be put to trial on June 4, according to the AP. The DPRK's Korean Central News Agency did not reveal any other details, including what charges the two face. If they are accused of illegal entry, they could spend up to three years in a labor camp. If they are found to have engaged in “espionage” or “hostility towards North Koreans,” they could add five to 10 years in prison onto their sentence. Lee and Ling were caught filming along the China-DPRK border in March. Both were working for Current TV.

Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who were detained by North Korean while filming along the China-DPRK border in March, are now set to face trial for their “crimes.” Pyongyang has said that after an investigation into the matter, the women have been charged with illegally crossing the border and could face up to five years in prison if convicted of espionage. Both women were working for Current TV, a Al Gore-funded “youth” cable news channel in the United States. Source: BBC

North Korea has confirmed that it's detaining two journalists it may have nabbed before they had even crossed the border from Chinese territory. The two women, Chinese-American Laura Ling and Korean-American Euna Lee, were accused of ignoring warnings to stop filming across the Tumen river.

• Morgan Stanley’s Chinese Land Scandal [NYTimes] "Last month, with property prices here and elsewhere in free fall, the bank dropped a bombshell: in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, it said it had fired an executive in its China real estate division after uncovering evidence that he might have violated the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American business people from bribing foreign officials."
• U.S. Pavilion at Shanghai Expo to break ground on schedule [Xinhua] "Despite fund raising problems, officials of the U.S. Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo 2010 say they are confident they will break ground to build a national pavilion on schedule this April."
• Premier Wen urges journalists to write "true, accurate" stories [Xinhua] "Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Saturday urged journalists to write 'true and accurate' news stories because it is a fundamental principle and a lifeline for the media. Wen told a group of Xinhua News Agency staff that Xinhua should take the lead in doing so and carry on its tradition of reporting news accurately, effectively and timely."

The Chinese media is rife with reports of a 25 year old Shanghai woman, Chan Juan (pseudonym), who supposedly gave up her RMB10,000 job, spent RMB100,000 in search of the ideal husband and cycled over 2,000 kilometres from Guangzhou to Shanghai to attend a matchmaking party that was organised just for her. She was promised by the organiser that 1,000 young men would be waiting for her but eventually only two men showed up, one from Shandong and the other from Zhejiang. More than 30 candidates from Shanghai were said to have indicated interest but all chickened out at the last minute.

Some reporter from Henan TV Station went into the public service hall of Neihuang Country (内黄县) and captured these images of civil servants playing online poker, knitting and even sleeping soundly in their armchairs when they should be working. That service standards in government bodies remain poor is to be expected, all the more when you're talking about a small and relatively poor county of just 700,000 in inland China. What took us more by surprise was the tone that this journalist used to shame and put down the already-embarrassed civil servants in front of the camera. In comments by Youku users translated by Youku Buzz:
• “Why did the journalist talk like a policeman?”
• “How can the reporter be so cocky?”
• “He will be beaten down by some gangsters tomorrow on his way home.”

From a source close to the proceedings: "Asia City Finance Director just made the official announcement: SH will cease publication with the December 19th issue. They're tired of subsidizing the Shanghai office's monthly loss, which is substantial, and in light of the global economy, they're stopping publication. ... They've got a few interested parties who they're in talks with, but nothing has been signed and mid-December is the deadline for that. Their plan for the future: A website. The same one they have now, perhaps not even run by anyone in Shanghai, but instead done by their Hong Kong office." The ellipsis you see in the text above replaced these thoughts from our source: "Cough, cough, bullshit, cough. It's not nearly the whole story, but it certainly provides them a convenient cover for exiting the market. Sales figures were way down well before any of the current economic crises. Cough, cough." Previously: You could be the next owner of SH Mag!

Via Andrew Sullivan we learn of this extraordinary project:

A photographer, his camera, a backpack, two years, one country, 56 cultures, 1.3 billion people, 33 provinces and 56,000 kilometers.

An interesting inside look at how China's state-run spin machine operates from the Sydney Morning Herald. Wonder how they got their hands on this.

Amnesty International's website is unreachable for journalists covering the Olympics one day after the organization issued a harsh report criticizing China's failure to make good on promises to improve human rights leading up to the Olympics. A more practical complaint from the press room — the internet is sloooooooooow. Welcome to our nightmare, guys. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, while admitting that websites for certain "cults" will indeed be blocked, blamed other inaccessibility issues on foreign web hosts. “There are some problems with a lot of websites themselves that makes it not easy to view them in China,” Liu Jianchao said. Hmmmm. [Source]

"Yesterday, Beijing News published an interview with former Associated Press Beijing-based reporter Liu Xiangcheng. The story appeared in page C15, and belongs to the series about thirty years of reform. The title was I used photographs to record the path that China went through. Next to the story is a photograph that Liu took during the June 4th incident in 1989. The photo showed a couple of wounded civilians being spirited away in a tricycle cart. Reportedly, the authorities recalled all copies of Beijing News after they realized what had happened. The story has also been removed from the online edition of Beijing News. It is expected that many people at Beijing News including the reporter, the page editor and senior editors will be punished." [EastSouthWestNorth]

The exhibit is scheduled to travel to over 100 cities around the globe, with an estimated 2.5 million iewing the photographs, and it will be stopping in Shanghai from July 3 to 24 at the Songjiang Art Museum. The show features the winning works of the World Press Photo Contest, showcasing the most interesting, creative images of illustrious photojournalists from the past year. The exhibit, most recently shown in Moscow, The Netherlands, Chile and New York City, opens Wednesday at 10am. It's a little out of the way, we know, but we think it will be worth the trip. Shanghai-based Ariana Lindquist who won first prize in the Arts and Entertainments section of the awards will be exhibiting her works.

In a new interview with Radio Free Asia, Ching Cheong (程翔), chief China correspondent of the Singapore-based Straits Times, who was imprisoned for over 1,000 days on espionage charges and released earlier this year, gave his thoughts on the recent talks between Beijing and Dalai Lama envoys, Taiwan's relations with the mainland and nationalistic fervour among Hong Kongers. On the arrest of Hong Kong student Christina Chan during the Olympic torch relay there, Ching Cheong laments that freedom of expression and the space for different opinions has "shrunk, or even disappeared" in Hong Kong after the handover.

This Sunday, kick back and enjoy this discussion on press freedom in China on Al-Jazeera's 101 East. The show begins with an excellent backgrounder on the current state of press freedom by Tony Chen who interviews people like Melinda Liu, Newsweek's Beijing bureau chief and president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China; former CCP official Bao Tong who is now under house arrest, and Huang Tianliang, the former chief editor of Bai Xing magazine 《百姓》who was dismissed for a report on farmers who lost their land due to corrupt party officials. The second part of the show features a discussion between Shi Anbin, journalism professor at Tsinghua University and Stephen Vines, former president of Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents Club.

We did not think it would happen, but it has. Hong Kong journalist Ching Cheong (程翔), chief China correspondent of the Singapore-based Straits Times has been released. This totally unexpected release has come about 3 weeks after his 1000th day of imprisonment. Ching Cheong was said to have been lured into the Guangdong Province while researching former Premier Zhao Ziyang (赵紫阳) and subsequently charged with spying for Taiwan. With Ching Cheong's release, all eyes are now on Hu Jia's trial.

Above, dear reader, you will see an example par excellence of lazy journalism. The header to this post is about as hackneyed as they come, but then so is the approach of a new periodical we stumbled across this week, the rubbishly titled SLmagazine.

The last time an anchor from our favourite TV channel made it to the news, he created such a brouhaha that culminated in the eviction of one coffee company from the Forbidden City. In the news this time is New Zealand-born anchor Edwin Maher who for many years before arriving in China was a weatherman with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Los Angeles Times published a profile of Maher that started it all off. It...

Chronic pain. Debilitating illness. There's little fun to be had from these subjects. So hats off to Shanghai Daily and its over zealous/under zealous/possibly nonexistent subs' desk for throwing a hyperbole cherry bomb in to the toilet bowl of one individual's suffering. The following, which featured in Friday's paper, is best if you imagine it's being read by Peter Cushing: STABBING. Gnawing. Burning. Severe pain can rip your life apart and make you pray for...

Wondering what the Chinese media are saying about Lust, Caution? We found the following story from the Information Times (信息时报) entitled Survey: Fans rushing to imitate positions in Lust Caution 调查:影迷争相模仿《色,戒》经典床戏 dated 7 Nov on Xinhua — yes, the website everyone goes to for high-quality Chinese journalism. Shanghaiist was so inspired by the spirit of investigative journalism exhibited by this reporter that we decided we had to translate the whole story to share with you. As an aside, it's been said that Chinese journalists just can't seem to get over the full frontal nudity and the brutal sex scenes, and director Ang Lee was supposed to have ticked off a Chinese journalist who insisted on asking questions related to the sex scenes, "Can't you ask a better question?"

The space station, the Olympic pigs and white-collar wages Shanghaiist scans thousands of China headlines every single day, and believe us, we do want to believe all the news we read here in China, but every now and then, we come across something that makes us remind ourselves to take EVERYTHING we read with a great pinch of salt, no matter how authoritative the source may sound. Just yesterday, for instance, China Daily reported that...

On the left, you have an image submitted by the Yangzhou Evening News to the 17th Annual Chinese Journalism Awards, for which it won a Class I award in the Best News of Jiangsu province, as well as a Class III photojournalism award in the national round. Lots of inspiring pictures and smart captions that would befit any award-winning page (see details of pictures here on ESWN). Some smart chap then decided to do some sleuthing, and went to hunt for the physical printed copy of Page A5 of the October 16, 2006 issue of Yangzhou Evening News, and what he found was the page on the right. Yep, that's right, the page sent in by the editor had been FAKED. And while we're wondering what sort of rigorous checks the Chinese Journalism Awards has in place, the next one takes the cake!

This documentary programme entitled "The Secrets of the Direct Sales Industry Exposed" shown on CCTV12 recently did an exposé on the sad lives of three young women involved in direct sales, one of whom eventually committed suicide by jumping out of a speeding train to avoid going home with her parents. Typical sad, sob story you find on CCTV. The programme showed the above three photographs of the poor girl, her image blurred to protect her identity [h/t ESWN]. Well, one viewer found the pictures looking very familiar and also went on to do some sleuthing...

These were the pictures that he found, and they are the pictures of model and celebrity Yang Bingyang (杨冰阳), better known as Ayawawa. Obviously, Yang is not amused, but in her latest blog entry has said that she has no intention whatsoever of taking legal action against CCTV. At the end of the day though, the number of journalists in China who think they can get away with plagiarism and fake news in this day and age is simply astounding!

Image from China Daily.

Our round-up of some of last week's highlights from China's English-language blogosphere: