Category Archives: Journalism

NBC LA Review: Panasonic LUMIX

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This week on NBC LA TechRaw I review the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-ZS3 which has the trifecta of what I’m looking for a compact point and shoot:

  • Wide angle and long zoom lens (25mm to 300mm in film terms)
  • 720p high definition video, optical zooming works while recording (!)
  • Beautiful optical quality (Leica lens)

It finally is a decent all-in-one package for journalists in terms of visual quality. The only missing element is an external microphone jack for great audio interviews. It lists for $349, and can easily find it for less than $300 at online retailers.

View more news videos at: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/video.

Change of Scene

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On August 1, my wife Mei and I boarded a plane in Beijing. We shook the dust off our shoes (literally), took the last bites of some of the best cuisine in the world, and made the big move back to the United States.

Our new home: Venice, California, and a nice modern bungalow near the beach where the sun shines bright and the sea air welcomes you each morning with a cool relaxing breeze. I’ll be taking up a new post as associate professor and director of new media the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Journalism.

I’ve always said I like to go where “interesting problems” are. For the last six years in Asia, I got to observe the growth and impact of the Internet in the region, especially while living in China. I also had the chance to write a book, the book, about Wikipedia while traveling the world to meet enthusiastic volunteers contributing their slice of human knowledge for free. It’s been a great ride.

As a journalist and educator, right now, there is no more compelling place to be than the US where the news industry is facing an incredibly tough challenge as it looks for ways to survive an era of digital economics with Craigslist, hyperlocal content, and rapidly changing subscriber and revenue models. It will require smart analysis, enthusiastic practitioners and a unique new role for the academy to help determine how the news industry remains solvent and relevant in the 21st century. I’m thrilled to be with USC to help figure out that future. It’s a city I never imagined I’d live in, but have been impressed and excited at every turn.

GreenDam postponed

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It’s July 1, and in China the ominous deadline to implement the Green Dam/Youth Escort internet filtering software has been postponed, to much rejoicing by Internet users in the country.

Green Dam graphic in China Daily

To outsiders, this must seem quite puzzling. Why would China’s “totalitarian” system need to back down on this?

This should be seen as a case study on how the complexities of China’s decision system is much more nuanced than what a “Communist” regime would suggest, and the role of citizen deliberation in a new, upwardly mobile, aspirational, IT-savvy China.

While the outside world sees the PRC government in absolute control, in reality the heavy handed, top down authoritarian system rides on a delicate balance of, bottom up public consent that supports the state’s legitimacy.

Here’s why Green Dam illustrates this quite well.

China’s Internet filtering is by far the most advanced in the world in terms of precision and scale. But until now, it happened in the “cloud,” in far off intangible spaces through two main vehicles:

  • One is through massive domestic Web site content regulation through revokable Internet Content Provider licenses (ICP). Operators have to self-censor through technical or human means to please the authorities regarding general guidelines on taboo topics. Keywords are banned and discussion topics are forbidden. In some cases, explicit timely edicts are required, such as for significant June anniversaries, sensitive political meetings (People’s Congress) or poor construction standards in Sichuan earthquake zones. Even with these, China’s netizens have come up with clever tricks and puns to get around many of these automated filtering systems.
  • The other is the Great Firewall, the blocking of what foreign Web sites China users can surf. The implementation is clever, in that restrictions show up as technical errors (connection reset, site not found/unreachable) and curb behavior through uncertainty and doubt about a site’s reach-ability, rather than fear. You don’t know whether it’s the Internet acting flaky, or whether a site is actually being filtered. Tech-savvy users can trivially circumvent this.

But you don’t need perfect censorship to have effective censorship. Both these systems do quite well for the PRC government in keeping the 3T1F topics outside the mainstream, and ensuring that the government is not embarrassed by reporting on its incompetence.

The key, here is that both the domestic and international filtering activities happened in the cloud, the ether, the machines that comprise the Internet. It wasn’t in your home and it didn’t intrude beyond the cable to your desk.

Green Dam suddenly put the specter of restriction, surveillance and control in your home.

With that one stroke, which probably seemed like the next logical innocuous extension of the censorship regime for PRC bureaucrats, the government took the big miscalculation of crossing into the the private space, and the personal property of China’s citizens. And that’s where the outrage came.

This was the camel’s nose into the private tent of Internet users. A poll on China’s major sites (Sina, Netease, et al) all showed over 3/4 of respondents said Green Dam was not necessary or a bad idea.

(NB: China is not the first or the only government wanting to censor Internet traffic for content. Australia’s Clean Feed proposal to covertly filter out sites at the ISP level has been under fire from their netizens, and was unceremoniously put on hiatus as well. Most public schools and libraries in the United States implement content filtering at some level. This is not a uniquely China issue.)

What the authorities in China didn’t realize was how serious that breach of boundary would be.

I knew it was going to be a tough road for Green Dam when it appeared the MIIT initiative was not a unified effort. Before leaving for my travels, I did commentaries with the Associated Press, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera and others, making the point that even China’s official news outlets were openly questioning Green Dam’s legitimacy. The new Global Times newspaper, which has been rather frank about other issues, led off with serious questions about the software’s safety.

Then came the big one.

China Daily, the official mouthpiece of the government, was publishing criticisms of Green Dam shortly after it was announced, even publishing Photoshop’ed illustrations of netizens mocking the system. (“Outrage over bid to tame Web“, China Daily, June 18, 2009)

One picture it included with the article was a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” multiple choice question describing Green Dam as “spyware” with “systemic flaws” that could be “exploited by hackers.” Another cartoon shows a gray hand of censorship coming from the computer screen and stiff-arming a computer user in the face.

Green Dam illustration in China Daily

It was clear at this point, the Green Dam initiative was from a smaller portion of the PRC bureaucracy, and not from the highest levels. China Daily would have never published something so critical if it was of the highest-level of agenda pushing.

China’s netizens were speaking, and the media and government were taking notice (and with higher ups looking the other way). So while this was not democracy in action, it certainly was something in action.

At TEDxShanghai last month, I described the phenomenon of Wikipedia and Twitter forming the basis of a new online commons where global netizens come to share and reinforce memes across geographic and social boundaries (SlideShare presentation). For years, enthusiastic faith-based technology enthusiasts hoped the Internet would bring democracy to any place it touched. This has been spectacularly elusive. On the flipside, some viewed the new Web 2.0 social revolution as “socialist”, “collectivist” and at worst, Maoist. That’s been inaccurate as well.

Instead, I describe the new borderless, socially agile, activist associations that crop up on the Internet as a new system of ‘deliberative adhocracy’. Alvin Toffler, and later Cory Doctorow, used adhocracy to describe a new form of rule based ephemeral associations that “capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results.” (Waterman)

Whether it’s as massive as #IranElection to bring global awareness to its politics, or as small as #MotrinMoms to discuss outrage at an insulting advertisement, we now have an online information commons (Twitter) and knowledge commons (Wikipedia) that supports a space for the new distributed Zeitgeist. In China, obviously there are other analogs (Twitter clone Fanfou, Baidu Baike, BBS forums, et al.) but the effect is the same. To see deliberative adhocracy in action look no further than the Human Flesh Search Engine that metes out social justice in the absence of a strong rule of law in China.

Readers familiar with my book will know I described how a Wikipedia Revolution changed forever how we deal with free access to knowledge and its production. I will however, be quite Burke-ian in my pronouncement about the Internet’s effect on China.

Revolutions are sudden overthrows and disruptive repudiations of the status quo. China has a terrible modern history with revolutions, with more of them going bad than good. The rule law is sometimes described as when “reason trumps politics.” To China’s authorities, the Internet is being used in a deliberative process that fulfills that role. It is not perfect, nor prevalent enough to ensure social justice on a large scale. However, it is a huge step forward for a country that is convinced that after a century of turmoil, that any step must take safety and efficiency into account.

The hiatus for Green Dam, is the standard face-saving way for the government to back down. There is a good possibility it may come back in another form, watered down or otherwise. But for now, China’s netizens are having their day.

Wikipedia trumps print media?

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“Scientists have more faith in Wikipedia than national print media”

That’s one of the takeaways from a recent poll of nearly 1000 toxicologists when they were asked  how various media outlets cover their specialty: the representation to the public of chemical risks. (The poll was conducted by STATS, The Center for Health and Risk Communication at George Mason University, and the Society of Toxicology)

Given the common lament that Wikipedia shuns “experts,” and information is produced by people “off the street,” the results are intriguing when you look at the numbers for other professional and “mainstream” media outlets. From the report synopsis:

WebMD and Wikipedia were seen as significantly more accurate in the way they presented chemical risk than any other media source.

·         56% say WebMD accurately portrays chemical risks

·         45% say Wikipedia accurately portrays chemical risks

·         By contrast, no more than 15% say that leading national newspapers, news magazines, and television networks accurately portray chemical risks.

·         Over 80% say that leading national newspapers, news magazines, and television networks overstate chemical risks

[...]

…only 15 percent described similar coverage in the national print media (i.e., the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal) as accurate. This figure dropped to 6 percent for USA Today and 5 percent for broadcast network news.

At a press conference at the National Press Club to release the preliminary results of the study, Dr. S. Robert Lichter, who conducted the survey described the Wikipedia finding as an indictment of the mainstream media – ” it’s disturbing that someone off the street seemingly can do a better job than the media.”

I’d take issue with the fact that Wikipedia is simply the product of random person “off the street,” but it is a real shift in what we consider authority and how reliable information can be produced.

Even the best performer, WebMD, gained the approval of only about half the toxicologists who were surveyed which should be a bit surprising in itself. My (full disclosure: unpaid, uncompensated) commentary as it appeared in the report:

“This reminds me of the Nature study [link] that was done in December 2005 where it found that on average, Britannica had 3 errors per article, and Wikipedia had 4 errors,” Lih says by email. “It was surprising because Wikipedia did much better than expected, given its foreign work process and Britannica did much worse. People had presumed a certain level of accuracy from Britannica’s reputation, and it was knocked down from that pedestal. To me the WebMD and Wikipedia results here are similar – they’re much closer than what one would expect. Wikipedia doing better, WebMD doing worse.”

But perhaps the most interesting part was not WebMD, but that the daily professional print media came up so short in the eyes of these experts. It seems to reinforce the old adage: “Journalists do a pretty good job of covering things, except for subjects in which you’re knowledgeable.”

The commentary for Columbia Journalism Review contributor Alissa Quart was insightful about why the MSM approach (reporting science as a storyteller for the masses) is perhaps systemically flawed:

“Journalists fall into storylines, because that’s how we write. There are three narratives, that we use, which can make us great but also get us into trouble – one narrative to please our editors, one to please our readers, and one which leans toward our sources, because we identify with them. WebMD and Wikipedia contributors are disconnected from most of those narratives – maybe they are trying to please certain readers, but they aren’t ‘the reader.’ Their model of knowledge doesn’t ask for stories, or sentiment or people.

This is a really good observation that meshed well with my views about the role of public relations and the dangerous media narrative driving scientific reporting. Quart and I arrived at the same conclusion.

In short, argument trumps aesthetics. Lih, an engineer by education, concurs. The clash of narratives “also says something about motivation, in that the mainstream press will be driven by reports, PR bring shoved at them, and also the market and the desire by editors (in a top-down manner) to demand reporters find a story in the latest research, even if in the greater context of the field, it doesn’t warrant so much attention. In that sense, Wikipedia’s motivations are different, in that the ‘crowd’ helps moderate and even dampen the type of ‘recentism’ that is so pervasive in news coverage.”

The overall summary can be found at the Stats.org site, or you can view the full PDF.

Content Management Systems Reconsidered

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There’s an interesting post at Sunlight Labs that takes a good hard look at the advent of communnity-in-a-box content management systems, and whether they’re worth the trouble when compared to more flexible “frameworks” like Django and Ruby on Rails that provide more primitive but customizable components. Actually, the title of the post is more forceful than that: “Content Management Systems just don’t work.”

He observes that CMS’es often have “opinions” that are an artifact of the original intentions of the creators, which often stand in the way of it becoming an effective tool:

the problem with a full scale Content Management System is that it has too many opinions. Those opinions were though of by somebody other than you and the needs of your organization. The more developed a content management system (or any piece of software, really) the more “opinions” it has. And the more “opinions” it has, the more likely one of them is going to really tick you off.

He talks about Recovery.gov and its use of Drupal. I’ve used the latter on small sites, and it got me up to running speed faster than I could have done myself. I’ve also used Joomla with a crew of 20 collaborative journalists. But I get where he’s coming from, because in the end, the training and the coercing of the CMS to do what I wanted was rather painful. If I had to run something larger, like Recovery.org, his advice would be to hire someone fulltime, and use a framework. Given how many sites Clay Johnson has overseen, and how many different systems he’s used, it’s a valid concern.

NYT: Do We Need a New Internet?

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John Markoff has a weekend story in the New York Times titled “Do We Need a New Internet?”

He provides anecdotes from influential security and Internet experts, but it comes off as a disconnected set of observations about IP addressing, security, privacy, botnet infection. Unfortunately, i’s a story with grand ambitions but without a logical thread.

From the very first sentence, the premise is problematic. He introduces us to the  Morris Internet worm (though oddly doesn’t mention it by name) which clogged the fledgling Internet in 1988.

Markoff concludes, “Since then things have gotten much, much worse.”

I was rather surprised by this. Some estimate the Morris worm affected 10% of computers then, but its impact was much greater since those machines were the hubs of timesharing and e-mail activity at coporations and college campuses in an age before laptops and cheap client computers.

I was working at the university computer labs in 1988, and since then I haven’t seen anything as massively disruptive as the Morris worm was in proportion to the user community. It had nearly every college system administrator scrambling during that time. The homogeneity of computer systems (UNIX systems running a variant of the BSD distribution) meant the worm’s job of infecting and propagating was rather simple, as it exploded out of control to jam computers and networks. Today, we have a wide variety of hardware and operating system software that has changed the nature of the risk so that an Internet-wide threat on that scale isn’t likely. Yes, on today’s Internet there are many more hosts and a wide array of threats. But characterizing today’s situation as “much, much worse,” than that massive Internet outage of the 80s is an odd claim.

One commenter in the geek ghetto of Slashdot said, the majority of the problems Markoff talks about “are almost entirely a Windows phenomenon” hooked up to always on broadband connections. Yet, Markoff doesn’t even mention this and only mentions Microsoft once in passing. More relevant would be explaining to readers how MS had been shipping insecure, dangerous Internet Explorer configurations for years out of the box by allowing ActiveX controls to be downloaded and executed off the net, no questions asked. Even in recent years, the firm’s reaction to known security holes has been sluggish (as has been the case with Markoff’s example, Conficker). One could also argue Microsoft’s new Genuine Advantage system makes things even worse by withholding system updates unless Microsoft can verify a Windows installation as a legit purchase. What this means is pirated Windows installations serve as persistent infected zombie bot-net computers. (Anyone concerned about these issues must listen to the Security Now podcast with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson. They do a great job explaining all these issues.)

When it comes to solutions to the problem Markoff has posited, it gets no better.

Consider this buzzword-heavy, information-light paragraph about a project called Clean Slate:

That has not discouraged the Stanford engineers who say they are on a mission to “reinvent the Internet.” They argue that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world. Like the existing Internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organization will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today’s network and are adopted as Internet standards.

Confused? I’ve read these lines five times over, and still don’t understand what the explanation is about. This is perhaps my general lament about the NY Times’s technology reporting. Too often, when trying to simplify their points for the layperson, they strip out so much information that it flummoxes both novices and experts.

There is a legitimate debate about the future of the Internet in terms of privacy and safety, but it is  more robust than this 1300 word story conveys. (See books like The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain.) Markoff touches on issues all along the OSI stack, from application level issues to low-level network architecture problems. But it’s not a cohesive argument for a “New Internet” per se.

CCTV/TVCC Fire: photos, video

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I’ll try to post later if I have more time about the fire here in Beijing, but we were right in the heart of it.

We can see the TVCC building’s all-metal west facade from our living room window, so imagine our shock when at 930pm, we see it lit up like a vertical kebab grill, glowing orange. It was 40-stories of flames and smoke. After grabbing video camera, SLR, tripod, Blackberry and cell phones, we ran out of the apartment to report the story (all in less than two minutes).

You can see some of the Flickr photos I’ve taken, of the fire and morning after. The images have been featured in a number of places, thanks to Twittering: Shanghaiist, Gizmodo, Curbed to name a few. This has driven about 15,000 image views in just under 36 hours. [Flickr]

Here’s the video story I worked on with the Wall Street Journal that evening with reporter/wife Mei Fong. (Flash needed)

UPDATE: The Dezeen architecture and design blog also carried the photos, which has pushed image views to over 24,000.

UPDATE 2: Actually the number of image views is north of 65,000, since it seems the 24,000 number is only for photos visited through the main set.

Responsible Blogging

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Bloggers vs. journalists. It’s a debate that still continues in the media circles, with only the most cursory examples used to argue the case. So the next time the pajama-clad scribes are cast as the evildoers ruining professional news careers, point them to this post on DailyKos as evidence of how these two sides work together.

Diarist “lollydee” relays a tip from a friend who is a Bank of America human resources employee. The news was “crappy.” There were  layoffs at the bank just weeks after a “three year protection package” expired for many employees, meaning no severance. It has not not been reported by the local or national “MSM”.

The writer reports only what is directly reported from the friend, but it’s important inside knowledge. In the comments section of the busy DailyKos site, others chime in to help triangulate with other data points. Some confirm the story, others point out some clarifications based onother reports. Lollydee posts them all as updates, and a narrative starts to form. But in the end, he/she tosses it to the “real” reporters. Addressing those sending tip offs in the comments:

PLEASE contact your local media, or at least one of the front pagers on this website.  I’m not the MSM.  I’m just an individual diarist/blogger and because I’m unfamiliar with the legality involved in posting certain types of information, I’m not comfortable going beyond this commentary.

I’m not a reporter…

I’ve done this once before, and I like to think I’m giving leads to those REAL reporters out there.

And, because I’m a good community citizen, when I get an updated fact I post it.  When I have a mainstream link, I post it.

Even though their work at the grassroots level takes place in the primordial soup of journalism (proto-news, if you will), bloggers are not out to negate the job of professional journalists. The best bloggers know where their own limits end and where responsibility begins.

Journalism academics and professionals need to understand this dynamic more, rather than engaging in the same simplistic CNN Crossfire-style bloggers vs. journalists debate.

Gigapan Goodness

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For photo enthusiasts, you’ll want to see the post over at Infodisiac, where they talk about the Gigapan, a robotic device to precisely snap tiled photos with a simple consumer-grade digital camera. The resulting images can be stitched together to make massive, greater than 50 megapixel images. Inspired by the famous Obama inauguration photo using this technique, Wikipedian Richard Palmer describes how this could be great for creating photos in Wikimedia Commons. [ref]

Best of all, the Gigapan costs less than US$300 right now as a “beta” price. I’m tempted…

But I fear setting up this rig in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square or Forbidden City would get me carted away by security. It doesn’t look much different than digital surveying equipment or a military-grade precision guidance device.

Recently Unblocked in China…

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It seems yesterday’s dispatch of sites being spontaneously unblocked was part of a larger move. Today, Hu Jintao held a rare pow-wow of media outlets in the wake of Internet restrictions being eased. From the WSJ:

The 66-year-old Mr. Hu’s appearance before foreign reporters Friday was a rare move into the public spotlight for a leader who has long shunned it. Mr. Hu has never given a news conference in China or abroad.

From the BBC:

Hosting the Games showed China’s desire for peaceful global ties, he said.

His comments came amid apparent concessions by Beijing in a row over internet access for journalists.

More sites which had been blocked in Olympic media centres – such as that of rights group Amnesty International – were accessible on Friday, journalists said.

Here’s a rather representative list of sites that are now available in China, which include newspaper, magazine and NGO web sites previously hard blocked. This is taken from some that were sent on a recent Great Firewall list, and some I’ve added.

This is actually quite remarkable for folks living in China. The “Big Three” NGOs that have been unrelenting critics of China have been reliably blocked for years. YZZK (Yazhou Zhoukan) and Apple Daily both in Hong Kong, have done some of the most critical journalism regarding China.
RSF, acknowledging the good news, doesn’t take much time to celebrate and continues to push hard.

“This partial lifting of censorship shows that the Chinese government is not completely insensitive to pressure. If the entire world had been pressuring China since 2001, even before these games were assigned to Beijing, the situation might have been different today. And perhaps imprisoned journalists would have been freed before the opening ceremony.

Let’s be clear though: these unblocked sites are still subject to the sophisticated keyword blocking system of the GFW, which looks at both URLs and the body of web sites. The sites above are no longer blocked, as a rule, but the content on the site might still trigger a block. On the plus side, it seems the keyword filtering of the GFW seems to be less sensitive than normal, but the big taboo subjects are still blocked quickly.

NBC Nightly News did a piece on the blocking yesterday (July 31). I was amused when Danwei‘s Jeremy Goldkorn was on camera demonstrating how to use a virtual private network and noted that living with the net nanny wasn’t that big a deal.

Goldkorn: “I don’t see that it’s really going to impede anybody’s work.”
NBC: “Do you think the foreign media is just whining a little bit?”
Goldkorn: “Yeah. Absolutely they’re whining.”

I suppose one could make the argument that leaving the restricted GFW “harmonized” Internet as-is would have given foreign journalists a real taste of what China’s Internet users deal with every day. Now, they get a freed-up, “special” Internet to do their job and this issue goes away for the next three weeks. The question is, after the party’s over, will any of the sites above stay unblocked.