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.

Chinglish, The Broadway Musical - The Funny Truth

Chinglish

This is a long overdue post, as the play, Chinglish, has concluded its run, and I saw it back in November. It's still worth writing about, however, as there are so many things that people can learn from a production like this, and so much that is timeless. It was written ny David Henry Hwang and written by Leigh Silverman, and it's essentially a comedy about an American businessman's first China experience.

From the Chinglish Facebook Page

The great thing about this play is that it wasn't just entertaining, it brought out a lot of the finer details of Mainland Chinese culture (and issues arising from cultural differences) that outsiders simply would never even have guessed. The underhand dealings (that were in turn, underhanded) made for a great plot, and this was probably the most easily accepted/expected part of the story. There were other humorous scenes like when the male lead, Gary Wilmes, tries to say "I love you" in Mandarin and it comes out sounding completely wrong because of the tones etc. Predictable, but well done nonethless. Other parts, such as the ex-English teacher, posing as a business consultant, admitting his waning popularity and novelty to Chinese people, was very true, and probably a concept less familiar to most outside of China.

The one point that I can't get out of my head is how they totally nailed the traditional Chinese view of marriage. When Wilmes professes his love for Jennifer Lim, the female lead (pictured above in my crappy photo of the play's programme), and suggests they divorce their respective spouses to get married, Lim talks about qingyi 情義. She says that she doesn't love her husband, and actually scoffs at the idea, but she will never divorce him because of qingyi. This is a word that doesn't really have a direct English translation, perhaps because the idea doesn't exist culturally in the Anglo world (per the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). The closest I can think of is loyalty, but it's more like loyalty, along with love, which doesn't have to be romantic at all. It's funny because in Hong Kong triad movies they talk about this yi all the time. People brought up the Chinese "way" generally know this and put it in practice (hello nepotism - well, that's the bad part anyway) but we hardly ever talk about it. This qingyi is also seen between the English teacher and the mayor, who ends up being taken in by authorities on accusations of corruption.

To me, the way that it was presented makes it a sort of wake-up call. Even though its main impact on Americans (I suppose) was that they got an "inside" look into what China is really like (and the play did a very good job of that), I believe the play was a rather introspective experience for anyone brought up immersed in Chinese culture and with some first-hand experience of the Mainland. It was very exciting to see that the writer's observations, experience and analysis of China were so real and detailed (or perhaps just similar to my own?), and that he brought them to life, and to a wider audience, on stage. I've spoken to many an outsider who thinks that if they understand guanxi they know all about business in China; Chinglish would have been a great, harmless way to tell them "yeah, right".

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.

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!