TEDxHong Kong 2011

"Eco-Warrior" Willie Smits on his DeforestAction project, using a combination of satellites and students to help track illegal deforestation activities in Borneo

TED has been around for more than twenty years, but it wasn't until the past two or so that I've occasionally been watching these videos about "Ideas Worth Spreading".

TED grew into TEDx, the 'x' denoting independently organised events that are intended to give a "TED-like experience", and since then, Hong Kong has seen all sorts of TEDx's, including TEDxWanchai, TEDxYouth@Hong Kong, TEDxVictoriaHarbour, several TEDxPearlRivers and another TEDxHong Kong last year.

The second TEDxHong Kong was held yesterday (Friday 2 Dec 2011) and was called "Forever 2011", which included speakers talking about such diverse topics as sustainability, human regenerative engineering, generational use of technology, Hongkong-ness, gender equality, child psychology, accounting (uhuh!) and cryonics.

I volunteered to live tweet for the organisers (using the @TEDxHongKong handle) for the afternoon/evening so I could go check it out, as I'd never been to a TED or TEDx event before.

The afternoon consisted of an ambitious programme of 15 speakers - Eric Schuldenfrei, Yat Siu, Douglas Young, Samantha Hung, John Hung, Katrien Jacobs, Mok Ho-Yan, Louise Porter, Ravi Mantha, Aubrey de Grey, Max More, Alex Backer, Gary Biddle, Willie Smits and Glenn Frommer.

I'm not going to summarise each one as my eyes are threatening to fall out like a couple of dry raisins, and plenty of others will be covering the event (21cb.net for one), so I'll just be totally unscientific about it and talk about a few that stood out for me (and so I'll remember what I want to read up on later...)

Dr. Louise Porter

The author of "Children are people too" discussed how we (laymen adults) generally view children - stubborn and disruptive on purpose etc. and says it's basically ageism. (If we applied those beliefs to different races, it would definitely be seen as racism, which she showed in sample sentences). One of her main points was that children, just like teens and adults, have needs that need to be met. Instead of using the hardline, reward-and-punishment approach to them, we should look at their behaviour - say, tantrums- as an expression of need, and treat it accordingly. If you, an adult, is unhappy about something, the last thing you want is to be put in a corner, or a chair facing a wall, right? Yet we do that to children in the name of discipline. When they do something good, we give them a reward - game time, candy - then children will be conditioned into doing things for an actual reward, rather than joy. Dr. Porter suggests we should genuinely celebrate achievements with children, through vernacular that we already know and use as adults - "congratulations", "I'm so proud of you".

On a personal level, I found this insight amazing, because my parents would never, ever, have said anything like that, and I sort of blame it on Asian culture. The Confucian ideas that imply or even encourage power struggles between parents and children. Children are always expected to be respectful - that wouldn't be a problem if parents (or older people in general) were also expected to reciprocate, regardless of age. Ageism, I would argue, it ingrained in Chinese or Confucian-influenced cultures. I'm curious as to how well Dr. Porter's views would sit with my parents and grandparents!

Dr. Aubrey de Grey

Dr. de Grey is Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, charity that "works to develop, promote and ensure widespread access to rejuvenation biotechnologies which comprehensively address the disabilities and diseases of aging". He is a biomedical gerontologist, gerontology being the study of aging (I don't think I'd even seen this word before this talk). His approach to aging is akin to engineering, he says, and in his presentation, he talked about how your body can be "maintained", like a car, and thus kept biologically young. This differs from geriatrics, as that treats the ailments that come with old age just like ailments of those who are younger, focusing on treating symptoms.

In his mile-a-minute speech, he cited stem cell research, for example, as a way of "regeneration" - replacing parts in your body, rejuvenating them, rather than let them degenerate as a result of the damages done by metabolism (like wear and tear), so that at the choronological age of 90, you might have the body of a 60-year-old.

Dr. de Grey mentioned some excuses that people would give him about why they couldn't accept this concept of regeneration; one of which was, "I won't be around long enough" for things to be invented/discovered to save each part of their body, and the response to that was simple - "do you have children?" then "do you want your children to live healthier?".

On the subject of "health", he also concluded that with regeneration, he only wants people to live healthier, and that longevity would simply be a nice side-effect.

Ravi Matha

The medical writer started by suggesting that the "human body is a pond", in which there's heaps of bacteria. He goes on to debunk myths about antibacterials, antibiotics etc. and questions why we spend so many resources on making 'sexy' antibiotics for treating symptoms and not spend more on finding out the root cause of illnesses. Incredibly entertaining, yet he uses his time to explain an astounding number of facts and figures. He proves that logic and skepticism doesn't have to sound radical or dry.

Katrien Jacobs

"People's Pornography" is the name of Jacobs's book, and that was the topic of her talk, which was about eroticism as activism, and how pornography in Mainland China is in fact a socio-political act against censorship and other social taboos. She gave various examples eg. DIY porn, the rise of VPN use because of Japanese porn star Sola Aoi's Twitter account, and of course Ai Wei Wei's "One Tiger, Eight Breasts" project that inspired some Chinese to courageously air their thoughts about censorship. And yes, as @crocophant duly noted, her PowerPoint contained porn.

Some great talks and topics, with ideas definitely worth spreading, or at least worth further reading. Speakers aside, the event itself was only okay. I want to say that everyone was really into the spirit of TED, with dreams, positive attitudes, no weird ulterior motives and so on, but that wasn't always the case. Oh, and the lack of WiFi, ticketing (HK$350 a ticket...) - here I go again, blah blah blah, who cares what I think. So, that's all from me, folks.

Page One - Inside the New York Times documentary. Is print dead?

While on a 12-hour flight last night, I watched, surprisingly, a documentary. Page One - Inside the New York Times is by Andrew Rossi, who also filmed other popular contemporary docos like Food Inc.

This is certainly not a film review - if it was it would be a terribly bad one, because all I'm going to say is, if you're even slightly interested in media as an institution, industry, machine or social good, see it.

Initially the film appear to be a big "is print dead?" doco, but in fact it goes a lot broader. It's filmed over one year, 2010, and in this year there's the rise of Wikileaks, the iPad, media companies going bankrupt (Tribune) and the NYT winning the Pulitzer Prize. But it also looks in the history of the Times, and the societal role of investigative journalism and longform media.

The most powerful sequence in this documentary was when David Carr, a no-bullsh*t type media reporter, was on an Intelligence Squared debate and held up a page on Newser, the news aggregator. The founder of Newser was of course the opposition. He's filmed to say print is obsolete because there's better technology now, and that media is all about technology. Then, David Carr holds up a front page of Newser (printed out) and cuts out all the news that came from newspapers practicing longform journalism. The page looks like a fishnet - holes everywhere.

The point in simple. Without content producers, there is no news to aggregate.

It's fair to say, and this is made clear in the movie, that very little investigative journalism is done by "new media" like HuffPo. Most new media simply spins off what traditional outlets produce. Without traditional media, there’s nothing to spin off.

However, perhaps what people want are précis. In the documentary, someone (sorry I've forgotten who) says that one of the things online media does is give it a catchier title. Is that mere journalistic elitism, that it ‘sounds’ cheap? I mean, I’m being the devil’s advocate here, but if a sexier headline will get people more interested in the news, then who’s to say it’s a bad thing?

Now that nytimes.com charges for online content (unless shared via social media, if I’m not mistaken), who’s going to pay? The aggregators will need to pay in order to harvest content and refurbish it, and everyone in favour of sensationalist headlines and summarised news will simply go to the harvesters, not the source. In the end, the only people paying for news are new media (well, them and the few people who want to read unloaded, proper English).

Is that the future?

But investigative journalism can be reported on whatever platform, online or in print. The problem here is not the technology used to publish it, it’s the money that goes behind the reporting. Reporting takes time. Well, proper reporting anyway. I knew that and yet it still surprised me to hear David Carr say that he’d need two more weeks to research the Tribune article and one week to write it. We outsiders tend to think that news is daily, but this just goes to show that behind every story is days, weeks, even months or years of research.

Which brings me to my point. Artists spend days, weeks, months or years to produce their work. While they’re producing it, they pay their rent, get fed and clothed by funds from patrons, and assuming they’re producing consistently stellar work, the funds keep coming. So why can’t journalists and newspapers have patrons?

The film mentions a non-profit institution for investigative journalism called ProPublica. Can, and should media be run like a non-profit? Some argue that accurate news is a public good, after all.

Either way, either by patronage or non-profit models, I'm inclined to believe the contemporary old wive's tale that people won't pay for good journalism anymore. Instead of a conventional, profit-making business model, how about we start looking at sustainable alternatives instead?

I feel that Monocle magazine is trying out a new(ish) model where detailed, investigative reports are funded by not only straightforward display advertising, but copywriting. The Monocle (or perhaps, Winkreative - Brule's advertising/creative arm) branding has been so successful that they've taken on the business of governments like that of Singapore, that want to desirably brand their nations. Monocle created a "National Survey" insert for them probably a year or so back. Their lifestyle section, I believe also takes a lot of product placement deals. Unfortunately, it was the lifestyle section that makes me think the model doesn't work. The Hong Kong survey/guide they did probably a year ago too, was appallingly lazy. I shan't elaborate, but basically they flew in, called one or two "cool" people, copied their choices, didn't bother to verify, (or whoever did doesn't know how to do "lifestyle" very well) and just filed a "report".

A truly great publication should excel in every section that it chooses to publish. Compromising the integrity of one section in order to facilitate the brilliance of another seems incredibly silly. Because of the sloppy "soft" news, I've lost interest in the "hard" stuff. I feel like double standards have been applied to the different departments, as if "it's okay for lifestyle to be bought, biased and under-researched, but no, that's blasphemous for serious news". Maybe it's my background in lifestyle that makes me biased and overly passionate about the integrity of the soft stuff, but lifestyle, relative to hard news, is oftentimes much easier to research. It's open to opinion, and as long as you justify it, you can always say "each to their own" and call it a day. So why skimp on it?

I realise I've totally gone off track. Anyway, we've got to start looking at alternative models. Investigative journalism is the kind of stuff very little people know they need, but without it, media, not just print, is dead.

SCMP Relaunch - A Second Look: The Tabloids

A couple of weeks since the relaunch and initial look, here are a few more snaps of the inside of the paper.

These are from the City section. I haven't been buying it every day, but for the days I have, I hadn't noticed any more embarrassing placeholders going to print.

I don't know how I feel about those orange speech mark lookalikes that appear before the block quotes either. They're really... er... big?

I thought I might get used to it, but the headline type still baffles me. It's so narrow and the tracking always seems too tight! Left alignment is normal, but with this font, font width and tracking it just seems to be really uneven (see photo below "Attempt To Boost..."). Mario Garcia says that he was inspired by how the city wakes up, and in Hong Kong it's full speed from 6am, but I can't see how this type is conveying this to me...

However, to be honest, I've been mostly interested in the new special-interest/tabloid/liftout format. The Food & Wine one in particular that comes out every Thursday, because of personal interest in more ways than one... This is probably the best thing that's happened to English food publishing in Hong Kong in a while. I love the varied approach - restaurateurs, critics, bloggers, um, Jeannie Cho Lee (mais bien sur!)

Of course, there's also the Life Style section (is it two words or one?!) that non-newsy people like me are always eager to flip through. I peeked at the paper every Friday since the relaunch and finally the first edition was released last Friday.

Can't say I was too excited about seeing Mr. Ford on the cover. Nice interview by Divia Harileila (her new blog is well worth subscribing to, by the way) but the rest was a bit blah. The sports car article threw me off a bit, but I guess that's just coz I'm a girl? I don't know, whenever I see yachts and sports cars I think "mainland" or "vulgar bling Russian". Much as I now have my reservations about Monocle, I think it's an understated luxury mag done right. But then again, who are SCMP's readers? Are they mainland/Russian blingsters? But they don't read in English... Are they students? Expats? In fact it's not just the style liftout, but the whole paper that begs the question.

(This Toys Club ad is pretty sad too - can't they advertise in the Family liftout (which comes out Sunday I think)?)

With Friday's paper came the Style Magazine - a glossy, luxury fashion/design magazine with lots of ads - or maybe the whole layout/look and feel felt like an advertorial/in-house magazine. There was some decent, insightful writing such as this Thomas Heatherwick feature below, but there were some fillers too.

So that's my leung sin (that's 2 cents in Canto, haha). As for the digital versions, I'll leave those for another day. But let's just keep it at this: I like the iPad one. Just wish the tabloids were on it too - the iPad is so perfect for lifestyley magazine content. The website remains sucky and the paywall makes it even suckier. If the NYTimes can figure out a social media-friendly model, we can at least copy it!

South China Morning Post's Relaunch

The SCMP is Hong Kong's only English broadsheet and probably one of the oldest English newspapers in the region, being 108 years old and all.

I used to read it in school (I spent most of my high school years at a British international school in Hong Kong) and to me, it was as good as any other English newspaper in the world. In recent years however, we've been seeing pretty horrific things, like place-holding "X"s on the front page in place of a block quote and so on. Having been in Melbourne and exposed to papers like The Age, I was pretty disappointed when I returned to what seemed like a dying SCMP. (That said - and perhaps I'm being nostalgic here - but it seems The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald now sadly share a lot of content, which is cost-efficient but makes it less "Melbourne").

Then I heard about SCMP's relaunch this year, which I thought was interesting because they were going The Age route (which was probably another paper's route earlier before it landed Downunder...) - there was going to be a special-interest lifestyle "tabloid" insert each day - e.g. Monday is Money, Thursday is Food & Wine (see their campaign mini-site for more). But I got even more interested when I found out that newspaper guru Mario Garcia's Garcia Media consulted for SCMP's relaunch.

Garcia Media might not be the only newspaper/magazine-focused design consultancy, but it is probably the highest profile. They relaunched papers such as The Wall Street Journal, and various major papers all around the world. A quick look on their website will tell you that they now do web and mobile components too. Sometimes these are just aesthetic design jobs, but most of the time they involve more, because for example, you need to work with editors re: flow if you want to change something in the layout.

I'm not sure exactly how "deep" this redo was, but Mario Garcia says on his blog: "From the very beginning, I was aware that this project would not be a mere cosmetic exercise, or another redesign... Instead, the task—and the challenge—would be to rethink the 108-year-old English language of Hong Kong for a new generation, a new Hong Kong and, of course, the new powerful and vibrant China." The last bit is a little vague, but you get the idea - it wasn't just a matter of playing with typefaces.

Speaking of typography, I found the relaunched SCMP a bit messy. I counted perhaps 3-4 different fonts and various versions of that orangey coloured font you see at the top. On Page 2, the only other colour used for fonts (aside from black) was tomato red, then later there was blue etc. I'm not sure I really like that headline font either. It seems to say New York Post more than South China Morning Post...

via The Mario Blog on Garcia Media

On the last page of the news section is a full page of smartphone snaps from the paper's photojournalists, all Instagram-ed and moody. They're soliciting photos from readers too - having a go at the user interaction thing and all, but I have to admit it was bizarre to find it at the back of the news section, rather than say, the City section. Innovation is great... but I'm interested to see how well this works out.

Actually, I'm interested in seeing how the whole paper works out.

Good Blogs about Retail in China

Just a quick jot-down of China blogs I've added to my Google Reader for some time and that are consistently giving me good info on Mainland Chinese retail habits and products.

I'm not a marketer, but being in Hong Kong, we're increasingly affected on a day-to-day basis by Mainland consumption. These English-language blogs are a great window into the fascinating world of Chinese spending.

Nicely Made in China
Like it says on the tin. Things that are made in China, nicely. They exist (even though some are from Hong Kong, which doesn't usually suffer the same prejudice as "Made In China")

Red Luxury
Good tracker of (usually large, globally-recognised) luxury brands moving into China.

China Youthology
A brand consulting firm that focuses on youth marketing in China. Digging up some good stuff on grassroots trends and second- and third-tier youth sentiments hard for non-locals to pick up on. As anthropological as it is commercial.

As I said, these are just a few I found along the way. Would love to know more if you have any faves.

Edit 25/05/2011: adding as I go...

Jing Daily
Similar to Red Luxury, but probably broader in scope (Red Luxury is more luxury fashion). They go into art, wine, retail and finance with more of an industry-level approach and also create original content as opposed to aggregating as Red Luxury does.