How much is the truth worth?

I was not trained to be a journalist. I have hardly ever had to pound the pavement, sneak incriminating questions into interviews or go undercover for groundbreaking scoop.

I am a food writer. I write about food, the stories, people and culture behind that food, and maybe the odd 'newsy' story on organics or food prices, but I've never done anything as amazing as warzone reporting or as important as business or political commentary.

But the reporting the truth in media matters to me, just like, I think, it would matter to any other regular human being, or to modern society. Even if it's as trivial as whether the food at a particular restaurant was fresh, well-cooked and good value. (Perhaps that is too much to assume, in which case we are doomed and the world might as well end this year).

What is the point of reporting if it were not reported as seen?

The media model as we know it is rife with conflicts of interest. Between the financial reports on TV are advertisements of companies listed on the stock exchange, and between cartoons are junk food ads. You may have other examples, but the media business as it stands today seems the most incestuous of all industries. For a long time, media practitioners stood by ethical guidelines that meant that they would provide what is essentially the public service of reporting, and for the eyeballs interested in those reports, advertisers would pay. Note that they are just paying for the eyeballs, not the pens.

But times have changed. There are obvious things like advertorials, but they are usually ethically labelled "sponsored" or the like, but as media companies have grown, the importance of the business component of publications have too. And business involves financial transactions - both immediate and potential. It's the potential exchanges of money that is changing things. The networking, the ass-kissing, the handshaking. It's not like someone has paid you to advertise something now, but you'd better write about their businesses in a favourable light, else they won't come to you for advertising space.

Money is important in our world. I don't want to be all naive and flowerchild about it and say it's not. Even organisations originally set up do public good, such as reporting, have costs, and someone, somehow needs to cover them. Advertising has been our source since the day one, but like I said, the system is disgustingly flawed.


It's not helped by the fact that there is simply too great a supply of media in the world nowadays. Most blame the internet - stabbing bloggers is still the thing to do, seriously let's get over it - but to be honest, who invented this technology? Us, humans. Do writers Google things? Do they read blogs by "citizen journalists" or "amateurs"? You bet we do. So why are we blaming what we now rely on and take for granted? It's not going away any time soon, so we need to work out how to embrace this "new" world (that has been new for so long that it's now old to say it's new).

It's time to rethink the media model. Remember, proper reporting is a skill and a talent, just like being a carpenter or a chef - and there are differences in quality that correlate directly to the skills and talent of the person/people producing the media. But the question is, how much are people willing to pay for it? Only a fool would buy a newspaper if they could read an identical piece of news for free on the internet, but what if it was a much more informative report? Perhaps much better written? Or with a core promise to serve the reader and not the advertiser? 


How many of you are interested in "old fashioned", honest, unbiased, deep reporting, and how much are you willing to pay for it? 


If we continue down this path of ass-kissing reporting, in the end, it's the readers who lose. Never again will you have good, clean information. Never again will your stock purchase be the result of your analysis of good data, because data with integrity can no longer be reported to you.


I'm going to propose a radical idea. Pay for good reporting and ditch the sh*tty versions. In a capitalist society (thank goodness we still have one in Hong Kong), consumer demand dictates everything. If you keep reading dumb news, that's what you'll get. We all suffer from information overload nowadays, but how much of that is rubbish?

Publishers rely on your eyeballs for income. Sure, the paper price, or cable TV subscription, but your eyeballs also secure good advertising dollars, which funds good reporting. When you read rubbish instead of the good stuff, the good stuff loses eyeballs, readership lowers, advertisers pay less. The good stuff gets hidden behind paywalls because that's how publishers think they need to recoup revenue. And so you resort to reading more rubbish. Bad cycle.

My solutions:
1. Read/watch/listen only to quality media.
2. Treat media with the same respect you do art.

Point 2 might sound a bit scary, but like artists, writers and perhaps whole publications, need patrons. People who believe in the skills, talent and craft of the media makers and are willing to fund them just for that, in order to provide the world with all the news and commentary that is worthy and fit to print.

I don't think we need to live in an ideal world for that to happen, but then again, maybe I'm being idealistic.

Marriage, some connotations and realities in Hong Kong

In the past few weeks, there have been a few articles in The New York Times and The Atlantic that have floated into my Twitter feed about marriage. There is a nice round-up of links here in The Atlantic. They talk about how single motherhood is "the new normal", a preferred choice, how it might be an indication of class divide, and how men's roles are changing within the family (fathers heading up PTAs for example).

It seems strangely appropriate that I've come across these articles today as my dear cousin has just announced his engagement (I knew via Facebook before I was told by his parents, how 2012), and the past Chinese New Year, I've been asked about a hundred times when it's my "turn to give out red packets". (Traditionally, only married people give out red packets, the singletons - supposedly children - are always on the receiving end. Although, when you get to "a certain age" and are still single, you are gradually expected to give out red packets).

Hongkongers are dogs; and some observations on Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong media

All over my Facebook News Feed tonight is this video of someone repeatedly saying "Hongkongers are dogs" and "Hongkongers are bastards".

This guy is supposed to be a professor from Peking University. I guess each part of the world has their fair share of barking academics, but China is probably the only place where someone like this wouldn't get fired.

If he has half a brain he'd know that by stirring this stuff up he'd get himself seen, read etc. all over the interwebs - and guess what, we all fell for it. (Fuelling the "us and them" mentality - how creative). Maybe it was the channel's idea. The broadcaster that aired it is V1, which I'd never heard of. A quick check told me that they're a "new media" company - the conspiracy theoriest in me thinks they're just looking for a way to boost their ratings and visibility in the crowded internet news market.

Anyway, the bottom video, "reported" in that highly sensationalised manner typical of Hong Kong news (now that is something to talk sh*t about) shows a Hong Kong man shouting at a Mainland Chinese family for eating on the MTR. The shouting is indeed very rude, but you'll notice that about a third of the way through, the man explains to the MTR staff that he had tried telling them to stop eating before he went bezerk. Now, whether that's true is up to your interpretation - but it's funny that that never even came up in the arguments. If anyone has a longer video to share, it would be great to get a backstory.

I hope this isn't China's way of getting back at us because of that survey data that came out the other day about Hongkongers not identifying themselves as being "Chinese".

The Year of the Dragon will be the 15th year Hong Kong's been handed back to China. That's 35 years till we're no longer "one country two systems". Mounting fear, tensions, uncertainties are not surprising, but not exactly the best kinds of things to ring in the new year with, hey?

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.

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.

Pop will save us

Yesterday Hong Kong singer/actress Gigi Leung showed her support for parents affected by the melamine milk scandal in China by posting a message on her Weibo (micro blog - Sina, i.e. China's own Twitter).

She was soon told by Sina admin to delete the message.

She did, and soon after, she posted:

《墨菲定律》很有趣：别跟傻瓜吵架，不然旁人会搞不清楚，到底谁是傻瓜?
Murphy's Law is so interesting, it says: Don't quarrel with an imbecile, else people might get confused as to who the idiot is.*

内地有内地的规矩...好，我删！但不公平的事还是不想再看到...尤其发生在平民百姓身上。
The mainland has its own rules. Fine, I deleted it! But I really don't want to see such injustice, particularly to the average person.*

Screenshot from her Weibo page

Hong Kongers are notorious for being apolitical, but also extremely susceptible to messages in mass media. Given the extremely low levels of media literacy, messages from pop stars are usually well-received. (Look at all the celebrity endorsed diet ads...)

Already there are people coming out to say how much they admire Gigi because of this incident. So will her little run-in help drill into HKer's heads that China's prevention of free speech could one day be imposed on us?


To read more:

Story from Apple Daily here and here (in Cantonese).

Some blogger/forum commentary:
(so far all in Chinese)...

MO's notebook 3 to 4
鹿米館
阿休 Blog
she.com forums

*my very rough translations - couldn't find the original for that Murphy's Law!

O, great motherland of China, we all love you

Is that sufficient to keep the propaganda committee away from me?

You know, it's been almost 13 years since the handover, and most of Hong Kong has gone from fearing the mainland to trying to to everything they can to please them/it. Why? Well, Hong Kong is all about the money, and this 1.4 billion market just north of us is just too good to resist. Hong Kongers are doing everything to wrangle their way into the market. Some do nice things like build schools, others fund government official's kids' Ivy League educations, and some do nothing. But even the last group wouldn't go out of their way to criticise the Motherland. No, no, that would be fatal.

Mainland leaders aren't the smartest, but they've managed to produce soft propaganda to have HK by the nose. How? Making it easier for HK businessmen to go into China to set up businesses, letting the floodgates open for the nouveau super riche to come and treat Hong Kong like a giant shopping mall... It's all money, honey.

The philosophy behind this is that as long as HK is fairly prosperous, no one will complain about their rapidly diminishing rights. Who needs rights when you can live comfortably in your 5,000 sq ft apartment on the Peak? Well, that's if your electronics factory hasn't been closed down because you let someone else pay for your local official's new car. Censorship? What's that? Just shut up and eat your abalone.

Hong Kong: Heritage preservation

Hot on everyone's lips, ears and eyes recently is the topic of heritage preservation, mostly in the domain of architecture.

I was therefore glad, though surprised, to hear that the Monocle team had their finger on this too.

Interviewed in The Monocle Weekly was Dr. Ho Yin Lee (who funnily enough, seems to have a slight Singaporean accent), Assistant professor and director, Architectural Conservation Programme, The University of Hong Kong, who proposed that this interest in heritage preservation arose post-1997, when people started to really think about Hong Kong's identity and basically realised that the remnants of history are meaningful and not just slabs of crumbling concrete waiting to be demolished to make way for shiny new malls.

Examples of this are a boom of projects like The Pawn and JCCAC. The former was, to my knowledge, mostly a privately funded project. Projects funded by the Hong Kong Government itself have been heavily criticised by both the public as well as architects and historians for preserving nothing but a facade and basically pumping concrete into old structures.

edit: April 1 2010 [1]
Recently, the hottest area in question is Wing Lee St. in Sheung Wan, said to have been 'saved' from redevelopment by the highly successful movie Echoes of the Rainbow.

Read more about it here.

edit: April 1 2010 [2]
I was just told about this website, Hong Kong Place, which is a great resource for anyone wishing to learn more about Hong Kong architecture through history, as well as government policy with regards to preservation. It seems to have been set up voluntarily and unfortunately is all in Chinese. Anyone want to volunteer translation services?!

How it all began

The Monocle Weekly, Edition 08

It's been more than a week since this edition came out, but was only tempted to download it when I saw that they interviewed Jimmy Lai, Asian businessman, media mogul and founder of both Next Media and Giordano.

The Lai interview itself was a bit of a letdown - I think Tyler Brûlé spoke more than Lai did - but the issues covered in the program - namely Taipei, pop/idol culture in South Korea and heritage preservation in Hong Kong, were spot on. I was extremely impressed by the relevance of the content and the authority with which this international magazine spoke about my region. So much so that I realised there seems to be a gap in the market and the blogosphere for indigenous English-language reportage from an international perspective.

The last sentence there might have appeared self-contradictory, but it's not. We need to look at ourselves in a mirror, through an outsider's lenses.