Sinocidal (a.k.a. “Five guys hanging around in China”) has a great post today by blogger ChouChou about how to write a China article.

Quick summary:

• Title: China/The Dragon/The East/1.3 Billion People/Red Star  + Rises/Century/Awakes/Stirs/Does Dallas
• Interview a taxi driver
• Add in a contrast — such as a statue of Mao with an ad for Coca-Cola in the background.
• End with a vague conclution about things looking bright — or remaining unclear — for either the country or for specific individuals in it. Or combine all of the above like this: “It seems that the future is looking bright for the 1.3 billion people who make up the world’s most populous nation.  But for Li *** – who is still working at the condom factory for just two grains of rice a year – that future is still unclear.”

Fellow blogger Mike J. compared it to this McSweeney classic: Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Column.

I agree that there’s a lot of formulaic writing out there.

In effect, what I think is happening is that writers are rewriting articles that have already been done, adding in their own color and quotes but without doing the hard work of actually discovering the trends on their own.

Back when newspapers were closed little universes — their subsribers and only their subscribers saw their articles, and their subscribers didn’t see articles from anywhere else — it made sense for every newspaper to have its own “big picture” story about major news events.

Now, with everything available online all the time, there’s no reason for anybody to be writing the same story that, say, the New York Times has already done. Unless they think they can do it better, or take a different angle, or otherwise add value to the discussion.

I believe that more and more news outlets are realizing this and cutting back on their “me, too” coverage — which reduces the numbers of stories such as those that ChouChou was making fun of.

There are two possible consequences of this: an outlet can cut back on its foreign coverage, or, an outlet can redirect that coverage in a more useful direction.

Too often the former happens.

I personally feel that foreign news is becoming steadily more important to people with globalization, so newspapers should be looking for ways to make foreign coverage more specific, unique, and relevant for their readers.

Say, for example, you’re the Springfield Times. You want to do a China story, and have a budget to send a correspondent there. You’re afraid that he’ll come back with the Sinocidal-style formula piece.

There are lots of ways to localize the China story, and make it useful and relevant for readers. Some examples (these are off the top of my head — I’m sure there are many others):

• Springfielders adopt babies from China. How does this process work? Where do the babies come from? What are the conflicts and/or trends involved? (Requires visits to the orphanages involved, possibly home villages of the babies, home visits to the new parents, interviews with grown-up adoptees.)
  
• Springfielders get stuff from China. Poisoned petfood is just one example. Look at an industry important to Springfield and find out how China is changing that industry. If a plant moved to China, visit the new plant. What is it like? How does it compare to the Springfield plant? Are there any problems? Any surprises?
  
• Springfielders sell stuff to China. Maybe it’s their time and expertise (English teachers or lawyers or architects abroad). Or intellectual property like music or books. Or actual physical stuff — luxury goods, electronic components, medical supplies. Follow them to China and find out how they’re used and who buys them.
• Springfielders lose money in China. For example, a company might see its product copied at a lower price. This can even extend to out-right theft, as in the case of software and movies. Springfield companies may even have problems with China-made counterfeit goods. So visit the factories of the counterfeiters — the victims are usually more than happy to give you directions.
  

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

At lunch today I had a nice chat with a lawyer friend about paying bribes. Now, I’m not about to comment on this issue in China (except to say that, for me at least, it hasn’t come up).

But I’ll share a bit of my experience in Russia and the former Soviet republics.

Again, I’m not often asked for bribes. When I am, I don’t pay them. End of story.

But I’ve known colleagues who had to pay through the nose for everything. Every single stamp, ticket, piece of paper, or anything else they needed — the bureaucrat’s hand would come out. Even for simple things like hiring drivers or translators, they were forced to pay way above the going rate.

Some dealt with this problem by bargaining hard, others by sending local assistants to negotiate on their behalf. Others just resigned themselves to pulling out their wallets.

And I have other colleagues who are never asked for bribes. Instead, they get favors from bureaucrats — favors that the bribe-paying guys wouldn’t even dream of getting.

What’s the difference? In my exprience, the difference comes down to how much they like the people they’re dealing with.

Let’s talk about Alex, for example. Alex was a freelance television journalist of European origin. Short, balding, funny-looking.

But he genuinely liked the people he met in the war zones. He liked the bureaucrats, he liked the mass murderers, he seemed to like everybody. Occasionally, we would get together socially with the people we were writing about and he would always participate in all the toasts, tell funny stories — and basically act like he treated everyone like an equal.

Everybody we met wanted to do him favors.

You don’t have to be a born salesman to do this, though.

Another colleague, shy and self-effacing, had a “shucks, golly gee, can you help me out here?” vibe coming off of him. And people did help him out. He wouldn’t rush up and hug people and pat them on the back, he would hang back shyly, but you could still tell that he liked the people he met.

Imagine you’re a big black man on an elevator and you’re covered in tattoos and carrying a gun and a tiny white guy in a nice suit gets on. (Those of you who’ve been there know exactly what I mean.)

If the little white guy cowers and hides in a corner, or puffs himself up, or otherwise acts like he’s scared of you and doesn’t like you, you’re going to be pissed off. If you’re nice, you won’t show it, but it would be pretty tempting to say “boo!”

But if the little white guy is relaxed, smiles, maybe compliments you on your guy, you’ll feel warm and fuzzy towards him.

When American journalists go out and cover wars in third world countries, we’re all the little white guy in the elevator. Including those of us who are big and black and covered with tattoos. We can’t help it. We’ve got money, and little notepads, and they’ve got resentment and lots of guns.

It can be hard to like mass-murderers. And it can be hard to like bureaucrats.

But if you get past the murdering and the paper-shuffling, we’re all just human.

Here are some tricks to help bring down those barriers:

• Do something purely social with the bureaucrats.
• Find a personal connection: does one of their kids go to school in the States? Do you know anybody there? Do you have any friends in common? Do you have common interests? Do you like the same movie or music?
• Do you have the same things? Do you hate the weather? Do you hate George Bush? Do you hate athlete’s foot? Do you hate your boss?
• If you’re single — maybe they know someone they can introduce you to. If they’re single, maybe you can introduce them to someone.

You don’t have to do all of these things with every bureaucrat you meet. In fact, you don’t have to do any of these things, with any bureaucrat. All you have to do is know that you could, if you wanted to. Making friends — even once — will help you change your attitude. You will know that if you made an effor to reach out, that you would see them as human. They will pick up on your attitude.

If your attitude is “I will never think of you as a human being — you are nothing more to me than a lousy functionary/mass murderer/racial or ethnic stereotype” then you don’t get very far.

So when you first arrive in a new country, do your best to get rid of that attitude. Make friends with locals. Make friends with local bureaucrats — even if not the same ones you’ll be dealing with.

Your attitudes will change. You will give off those little, unconscious signals that you see the other guy as an equal, that you think he’s okay, that if you got together you might wind up friends.

And that makes all the difference.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

There is a shortage of English-language writers and copyeditors in China.

Especially experienced ones. The reason is that expats typically don’t stay in China for a long time – it’s stressful. They start missing their friends and parents. They want to buy shoes that aren’t four sizes too small. They want real pizza. They miss Chinese food. (There’s no Chinese food as we know it in China. Unlike India, which is full of Indian food. And Japan, which is full of sushi.)

Also, copyeditors tend to be quiet, meticulous people. They’re good at punctuation and AP style. They tend not to hop on a plane and move to China.

The ones who do are the risk-takers, the earth-shakers — but they often don’t have the patience for good copyediting. As a result, China is full of English-language editors who are not really a natural fit for their jobs.

And there are plenty of English-language pubs here that can use a good go-over.

Skills needed:

• The ability to work across time zones, with people you’ve never met, who have trouble communicating in English.
• Must be patient — you don’t have to clean up the whole paper at once. Just leave it better than when you started. Gradual improvement is the key.
• It helps if you can switch between US and British spelling and grammar.
  
• It also helps if you’re sensitive and willing to teach. Use grammar and usage mistakes as learning opportunities for your writers. They’ll be greatful, and your work will get easier as their writing improves. If you’re heavy-handed, they might start arguing with you — and really, you can win a grammar argument with someone on the other side of the world who has his English grammar textbook open in front of him. (Some of the English textbooks used here are just horrible.)
  

How to get started:

• Do some networking. Volunteer to help edit websites for professional journalism organizations, or copyedit some industry newsletters. Do a long-distance internship or two. Build up a portfolio and a list of contacts.
• Work one-on-one with writers. There are Chinese writers (I personally know at least one) who are writing for US pubs about China and could use some editing help.

Benefits:

• China is growing very fast and needs more and more copyeditors. This is a career that will keep you set for life.
• You work at home, on your own schedule.
  
• You get to travel to China to meet your writers and bosses, and it’s a tax-deductible business expense. Hey, your pubs might even spring for the tickets.
• You’ll be part of covering the biggest story on the planet. Without leaving your home.
• You can work around your current job or class schedule or babies or sick parents.
  
• You can live on a tropical island somewhere and take your laptop to the beach where you work while you sip (virgin) pina coladas.

Look me up.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

I’ve long thought that email interviews were the lazy man’s way of researching a story. You put gother a list of questions, copy and email them to everyone who might potentially be a source — whoever writes back, you cut-and-paste their answers into your story outline, and you’ve got the article.

But now it seems that some sources prefer them, too. Check out, for example, this article by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz: Interviews, Going the Way of the Linotype?

An email interview, even more so than a taped interview, protects both the source and the reporter.

For international journalists, email interviews have a few other advantages, as well.

For example, if you are in the United States, it can be very difficult to call China and some other Asian countries. One of my editors, used to have to get quotes from Asia on a regular basis, and completely gave up trying to do it by telephone.

When I was back in the States last summer and had to do China interviews, it was equally difficult. I tried AT&T among other providers. The calls just woundn’t go through, and if they did, the connections were lousy, there were echoes on the line, it was really hard to have a conversation. This is really ironic, since I have no problems calling out of China at all. When I have an interview scheduled with a US-based source, I arrange to make the call. Sometimes, people do insist on calling me — about 20% the connection is fine. The rest of the time, it’s pretty horrible and I have to call them back. When I call out, it’s crystal clear 100% of the time (I use CNC IP calling cards, and recommend them highly.) People can’t tell that I’m calling from overseas.

But my point was — email eliminates the problems with bad telephone connections.,

Email also reduces the problems of understanding people’s accents. Most non-native English speakers write better than they speak — and, if they wanted to be absolutely certain about what they said, they can have someone look over their email before they send it out (not to mention running a spell and grammar checker over it). There’s no way to do that with a telephone interview.

Email also eliminates the problem of the reporter’s accent. Foreign reporters can run their questions through a grammar checker, a colleague, and maybe even past their editors just to be on a safe side. And they’ll never hear that annoying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand the question. I still can’t understand you, what did you say?”

Finally, email solves the time lag problem. You send out your quotes during the day, your time. The sources answer them twelve hours later — during their working hours. You come in to work in the morning, and you’ve got your answers and can send out follow-up questions.

It’s no good for breaking news stories — but for those you have to stay up all night, anyway, so you might as well make the calls.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

Last month I received an e-mail from Dinesh Maharjan, a journalist with the National Press Club in Nepal. He is inviting us to establish a “bilateral friendship” to grow between our two organizations. “We believe that always hard work under the UNESCO principles and international information order to benefit the occupation rights and security for the journalism.”

They will be celebrating the 23rd Anniversary of the National press Club, Nepal (NPCN) in September 2007 and are interested in a journalism exchange as part of a “Journalism for Peace” program.

When I visited Nepal in 2000, I had the pleasure of meeting Purushottam Sigdel, a journalist who was targetted by the Maoist Rebels. I was able to help him acquire political assylum in the United States. I invited him to provide some insight into the journalism situation currently in Nepal:

“… the jouranlism in Nepal is now gaining momentum around the country. Nepalese people, in recent years, ahve really enjoyed the press freedom despite certain flaws and limitations. The grim reality is that 90% of the journals published in nepal are nothing but the political mouthpiece of different political parties. It has always been a bad culture in Nepal that it is a privilege to be the journalist of ruling party. It is rare to find non-partisan, impartial and people-oriented journalists.

“I also regret to say that most of the journalsits change their color, as Chameleon does, according to their vested interest and political environment. Common Nepalese people do not trust them because of their self centered, unprofessional and irresponsible behavior.

“We have a popular saying in our country that ‘when the elephant is in trouble, even the grog starts kicking him.’ This proverb actually applies to our journalists. Usually they write with great fanfare about the elephant but once they see elephant is in trouble, they write with the similar fanfare about the frog. But again, if they see elephant coming back, they start writing about him.

“Nepalese journalism lacks honesty and professionalism, which I think is commonplace in the third-world countries. It is sad to say that jouranlism in Nepal has become more miggickry rather than factual informative. Having said that there are still very good jouranlsits but unfortunately are in shadow.

“What I mean to say is any journalist in Nepal without political blessing can not survive in this field. National PRess Club, Nepal is a platform from where journalists of all and sundry put forward their voices of collective interests. This is an association recognized by the government.”

On a weekly basis, I’ve been getting e-mail from journalists from around the world — mostly in countries with limited resources for good journalistic training. The same message comes through — please help us.

Yes, there are established universities and organizations that are training journalists in other countries, but their focus appears to be other universities and organizations in the urban parts of those countries.

My personal interest is in southern Africa where their press is located in the largest cities. However, 70-80% of those Sub-Sahara countires are rural villages who don’t get their news and information through conventional western-style media outlets. They are the same people who are suffering the most through crop losses, militia intrusion, and corrupt local governments.

Many of these villages have people with the African version of ink in their veins and want to be good journalists, but only have a Colonialist-style of tabloid journalism to use as a guide. This style of journalism has only given governments a great excuse to impose strict restrictions on press freedoms and strengthened government control of the media.

I receive other e-mails from other countries who are developing their baby-steps of a free press in not-so-free governments in areas once controlled by the Soviet Union. Again, the cry from them is a universal “help” us, fellow journalists.

When I participate in a committee or an organization, I like to look at the goals-and-objectives, see if there is an action plan to implement those goals-and-objectives, and then evaluate how successful the committee has been.

For those of you officially on this committee, there must be a reason you agreed to participate in this international committee. Everyone has a hot-button of interest that you would like to see this committee accomplish. Please let the group know so we can get started in accomplishing something as a committee.

For those of you who are not on this committee, but may be interested in what we are setting out to do — please let us know what you would like to see us accomplish. If you know of a special need in a country that could benefit from something this committee may be able to accomplish, I need to know that so we can set an agenda, develop goals-and-objectives, develop and implement an action plan, and start checking off our accomplishments propelled by a really dynamic committee of really great people!

I’d like to hear from the committee with your list of things you would like to us to do. I’ll set a deadline of the end of the month of May for your input.

Cordially,
Alan Kania, Chairman
SPJ International Journalism Committee

Since I’m in the process of easing out of being a journalist, and easing into being a business owner, and this is a blog about international journalism, not about entrepreneurship, I’m going to use this forum to look back on my 15-plus years in the field.

Today’s mistake: Bad record-keeping

This isn’t the biggest mistake I ever made as a journalist. (I’ll save the ones that got people killed for a little later on.)

But it is a mistake that bothers me more and more as times goes on. It doesn’t bother me a huge amount, but just enough.

For example, I don’t know where most of my old sources are now. I kept records on various little scraps of paper, on computer disks that are no longer compatible with computers (and are probably unreadable by now, anyway), and in memo books that are mouldering in miscellaneous attics.

Nobody working today should be making this mistake: keep all your sources in an easy-to-use electronic format, and move them all over whenever you upgrade software. The guy you interviewed ten years ago may have become the CEO of the company – and if you’d kept in touch with him once in a while, you would know that.

And not just sources are lost — so are former colleagues.

I have a bad memory for names, and have forgotten those of many of the people I’ve worked with, and who have been influential in my life. I’ve forgotten the name of the Chicago Tribune international editor who suggested that I go overseas on my own rather than waiting for someone to send me. I forgot the name of the sports editor I worked next to for months in Moscow who has since married and moved to Cleveland. I forgot the last name of Jose, who wrote that fantastic piece about learning to deal with Russian bureaucrats — not by crying (as a columnist at a competing newspaper suggested) but by learning to vomit at will. Jose, where are you now?

Okay, I went and Googled — his full name is Jose Alanis. But I still can’t figure out where he is now.
But there’s even more stuff that I’ve forgotten. For example, I haven’t kept clips of all my published articles and photographs — some of them have probably disappeared forever. Or stored in a dark archive somewhere forgotten by all.

Some of these are historic photographs, too — such as the one I took of Manana Gamsakhurdia wailing over the grave of her husband, the first democratically elected president of Georgia (who later became a tyrant, was deposed, launched a civil war, and, before he died under mysterious circumstances, gave me the last media interview of his life).

And I’ve also lost details of important events in my life. Details that I didn’t bother writing about when I was living them that now I really wish I had access to. Someday, I might write a book about my times in the war zones — or, at the very least, blog posts. I’ll have to rely on my memory, and my memory stinks.

Please, young journalists, learn from my mistakes: keep good records. Keep a journal. Take plenty of pictures and store them in formats that will adapt as technology progresses.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

One of the challenges given to the SPJ International Journalism Committee is an opportunity to create a list of resources that many of us use to get interested in covering international news and in eventually working and/or studying abroad. These resources are scattered all over the internet — some of us even have our own private stash of contacts. I cordially invite you to go through your resources to help me compile an online database that we can share with others. Please post your contacts and, if possible, provide a little insight into how you compiled your database of contacts. With a little encouragement from each other, I think we can produce an incredible list of resources and advice to help develop better international coverage. Best wishes, Alan J. Kania, Chairman SPJ International Journalism Committee

If it’s May it must be time for the annual ritual of the World Health Organization to deny about 12 million people the right to hear about the WHO’s annual gathering from their own media outlets.

In recent years the WHO – a United Nations’ body – has been adhering strictly to the letter of the UN’s press guidelines, which state that media credentials may only be issued to states or organizations recognized by the United Nations. So that means the media outlets affiliated with Tamil Tigers, the PLO, and half a dozen other organizations may have reporters present. It also means that reporters from the free and independent media of Taiwan are banned from the WHO and the UN.

You might think that banning the media from the only Chinese speaking democracy flies in the face of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). And you would be right. The problem is the UN Charter and the UDHR have little to do with each other.

And then there is that little problem of China working overtime to make sure that Taiwan is kept isolated from the rest of the world.

(Quick history lesson: When the Nationalists lost the civil war to the Communists in 1949, the Nationalists set up shop in Taiwan. Both groups – Nationalists and Communists claimed to represent all of China. Until the 1970s and 1980s, most of the world accepted the Nationalists as the “rightful” Chinese government. That all changed and now less than a couple dozen countries recognize Taiwan as China. Until the late 1980s, Taiwan was just as much a dictatorship as mainland China. That all changed in the early 1990s. While the rest of the world was watching the demise of the Soviet Union and its empire, Taiwan quietly and peacefully moved from a Stalinist form of government to a vibrant and lively democracy.

This move to democracy was sealed by 2000 when the government changed hands from the KMT to DPP. This represented the first time in 5,000 years of Chinese history that power moved from one party to another without heredity or violence. Thus endeth the lesson.)

The only other Chinese-speaking entity in the world where the media are free and where political dissent is openly displayed and allowed is Hong Kong.

For a number of years the SPJ has called for the WHO and the United Nations to allow reporters for Taiwanese news outlets to cover their proceedings. Apparently, however, apparently under steady pressure from China, anyone with ANY affiliation to a Taiwanese publication is denied press credentials.

At first the WHO just banned Taiwanese passport holders from getting credentials – Taiwan is not recognized by the UN. Then it became anyone working for a Taiwan news outlet.

One has to assume the decision to keep out the Taiwanese media is strictly a political one and one that caters to Beijing. It certainly cannot be because the WHO deliberately wants to violate Article 19.

Just why the WHO is acting so subservient to China is a real skull scratcher.

Let us not forget, it was the free media of Hong Kong that first reported a new virus affecting people with flu-like symptoms. The common factor to all the people affected was that they all visited certain areas of China. The Chinese government denied there was any such outbreak. They jailed Chinese editors and reporters who tried to report on this outbreak and then once the story finally did break Chinese authorities stonewalled the WHO and the rest of the world in trying to determine the source and cause of the disease.

Of course, this was the famous SARS outbreak of 5 years ago.

And now local and national Chinese authorities are once again obstructing international efforts to find out more about the additives a Chinese manufacturer put into pet food that caused the deaths of a number of American pets. What makes this latest example so problematic is that the same additive is put in human food for export to the States and Europe.

Once again, there are reports that journalists trying to uncover more information on this issue are being harassed by government authorities.

The bottom line is that the Taiwanese people would like to hear about the latest issues of the WHO from their own reporters without having to go through the filter of Beijing or a Western news organization. The 12 million people of Taiwan deserve to enjoy the rights as enumerated in Article 19: “Everyone has the right … to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Low end reporting work: Get press release. Rewrite to AP style. Call the company involved for a follow-up quote. File.

High end reporting work: Research a difficult technical, financial, regulatory, medical or scientific subject. Call a dozen experts or participants. Write an in-depth, analytical story. File.

Both types of work can be done by telephone and Internet. Neither require on-the-ground reporting.

Here in Shanghai, we do cover a lot of Chinese stories. It helps that we have Chinese speakers on staff to read Chinese-language reports and conduct interviews. But we also cover all of Asia-Pacific, especially when it comes to the payments, securities and outsourcing industries. These are specialized fields where subject matter expertise is more important than nation of origin.

But, more than that, we also cover US and European finance and technology stories, using writers in China and India.

Part of it is the fact that, for specialized stories, geographical boundaries are meaningless. For example, even when I was reporting from the US, I often quoted technology users at brokerage companies in Europe and Asia, even when the vendors themselves were based in the United States. And the experiences of those users are more and more like those of users in US offices. If a bank in Japan, for example, has a problem with a particular online banking platform, banks in the US will probably have the same issues. (Except in cases where local conditions, such as double-character fonts, are at fault.)

The other part is that once you can talk to a bank or a brokerage in Japan or Korea or Australia or Germany, you can talk to a bank anywhere. If you’ve figured out what service oriented architectures are all about, you can use that knowledge in any story. A background in chemistry or medicine can help you tackle these specialized stories in any geography.

Finally, many stories no longer have a particular geography associated with them. For example, for a story about a particular company’s plans for China, we might talk to their China managers and customers. We would also talk to senior executives in the United States, and experts and analysts in both countries.

These days more and more stories fall into the latter category as entire industries become globalized overnight.

Add to that the fact that executives rarely sit in one spot anymore — they’re flying all over the planet.

It’s happened to me more than once this past year:

I call a US company to set up an interview with executives. The PR person organizes the call. I get up in the middle of the night to call in. During introductions, I explain that I’m calling in from Shanghai. Then the vice president explains that he’s calling in from India. And the other senior exec is calling in from Japan. The only one on the call for whom it’s the middle of the day is the low-level PR person organizing it. (Much hilarity and embarrassment for the PR person ensues.)

So it comes down to experience. Does the reporter know the industry? Know the technology? Have the financial or scientific background to tackle the story?

The same things are important as with US-based reporters: How many years have they been covering the industry? Have they written articles on similar topics? Do they have an educational background that prepares them for the work?

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria