Wilson Lau New Media

I have picked all the relevant leads so far from my subscriptions to del.icio.us feeds. Here are the possible story leads that I plan to follow up for my final project “changes in Buddhist organisations and their activities in Hong Kong since the handover”:

Radio broadcast - started in August 2006, Metro Radio’s financial news channel broadcasts this programme from 11 to 12pm every Sunday. This progamme invites speakers to discuss the exploration of Buddhism and Buddha’s teachings through observations of small things and matters in our daily life. I think this is worth looking at as it is a radio broadcast programme that reaches a wide audience. And the information I may be able to gather from the hosts of this programme should reflect the changes in attitude towards Buddhism among the local population.

To follow up on the trends in Buddhist academic studies in Hong Kong, I will look at this discussion group formed by the current students of the HKU’s Centre for Buddhist Studies. This site  keeps me updated on the issues of concern to the centre’s students. I will follow up on theposts by the students and arrange interviews with them in future. Information gathered should help me to build up the part on the new developments of Buddhist academic studies in Hong Kong.  

 As for reporting on the activities organised by local Buddhists’ organisations and monasteries, I have received this tagged site run by the Po Lin Monastery  from my del.icio.us feeds. This well-maintained site is frequently updated and has comprehensive information on the latest Buddhist activities in Hong Kong and on the mainland. This tagged site of the Hong Kong Buddhist Organisation supplements the information from the Po Lin’s site.  In addition, I got this tagged site the Buddhist Compassion Charity Fund from the feeds. This organisation has a regularly updated list of Buddhism-themed activities for adults and children taking all over Hong Kong. The organisation  publishes a monthly magazine and its site runs articles from local Buddhists. I believe it is a valuable source to get a better understanding of Buddhist activities in the city.

 Apart from the academic studies of Buddhism and the public attitude towards Buddhism, I would like to explore Buddhists’ organisations contribution to social welfare. This tagged site of the Buddhist Hospital should be a good start. This community hospital was founded by the Hong Kong Buddhist Organisation. The organisation also has a branch The Hong Kong Buddhist Organisation Youth Centre  which organises extra-curricular activities for underprivileged school children in Hong Kong.

Following the instructions from Rebecca for Week 4 Assignment, I have subscribed to four del-icio.us tags. They are: Buddhism in Hong Kong; Buddhist organisations in Hong Kong; Buddhism academic studies in Hong Kong; and Hong Kong Buddhist blogs.

Technorati Blog Post Search v Google Blog Search

A blog post search in Technorati on the first topic “Buddhism in Hong Kong” has come up with disappointing results. The top ones in terms of relevance are mainly travel blogs maintained by people abroad. They are not relevant to my final project. At Google, the top 10 results include this site for a psychology journal and this post by a Buddhist in the U.S.

The first 10 results from the search on “Buddhism academic studies in Hong Kong” include two posts in my blog. The posts are: 1 and 2. The rest are irrelevant. There was nothing much from Google blog search, but I followed its advice and created an email alert on this topic. Will wait and see any relevant messages sent to me on the next few days.

As for the search for blog posts of “Buddhist organisations in Hong Kong”, this one is the top choice. Because i t looks quite relevant, I have tagged it. Then a couple of my blog posts were in the list. There was nothing much from the Google search.

Finally, the first 10 results in the search for the “Hong Kong Buddhist blogs” indicate that the system did the search based on “”Hong Kong” and “Blogs” mainly. One of my posts in this blog was in the top 10 results again. All the others were irrelevant. Nothing relevant resulted from the Google blog search.

James Foust has outlined in his book Online Journalism the useful information resources for journalists. I used some of them, like listservs when I worked as an editor for a trade publication. For example, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council provides free subscription to its e-newsletter.

Based on my experience in the research for blogs related to my topic ”changes in Buddhism, Buddhist organisations and their activities since the handover”, del-icio.us and Technorati are useful additional tools. They have enabled me to expand the scope in my search for relevant blogs and sites under the four sub-categories above. An example is the search helps me discover social tags as described by Mr Weinberger in his article “Tagging and Why It Matters?”   . By tracing this tagged site of the Po Lin Monastery, I have found that four people other than me have saved and tagged it. I have gone further by clicking one of them and found that a Yorick Chan has tagged a total of 35 items under Buddhism.  This represents so much more information that is potentially relevant to my topic. In addition, I have subscribed to the del-icio-us tag RSS feeds for the 4 sub-topics and I will monitor how they might help over the next few days. I have also subscribed to Technorati search RSS feed for CEPA in Hong Kong   and it has been sending me new relevant blog posts.

For the moment, I have only started exploring the advantage of del.ico.us and Technorati and I have yet to identify any drawbacks.

The page in wikipedia on which I have worked on is  Religion in Hong Kong, Buddhism and Taoism.  I have beefed up the part on Buddhism and activities organized by Buddhists’ associations in Hong Kong. I have also updated the information with the new “Buddhism- themed” tourist attraction Ngong Ping 360 Skyrail Cable Car on Lantau Island and incorporated it into the original paragraph on Po Lin Monastery. Hyperlinks to websites on the Skyrail and some spots of interest to tourists have been added.

Like the Anglican (Protestant) and Catholic churches in the city, Buddhists’ associations and temples have long been involved in the social welfare of the city. The Buddhists’ associations have been actively promoting “harmony” in the society – an essential Buddhist value often advocated by the former chief executive Tung Chee Wah and Mr Donald Tsang, the present chief executive. I have cited examples of schools, elderly homes and centres for local youth and children and provided the links to individual organizations’ websites. They are in the third paragraph of the entry.

In the fourth and fifth paragraphs, I have highlighted some of the changes that Buddhists’ organizations have undergone since the handover of the city’s sovereignty back to China in 1997. For example, prominent figures of the local Buddhists’ associations have become more open in discussing politics in public, even openly endorsing the re-election of the SAR chief executive.

In the last paragraph, I have highlighted the fact the two of the most important education institutes in Hong Kong – the Hong Kong University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, have established research centres devoted to the religion. Not only do these centres help develop more systematic study of the religion, they also help connect local Buddhist scholars with those in the rest of the world, particularly mainland China. I have included the links to the websites to the centres.

Is it Journalism?   

Contributing to, editing and correcting wikipedia’s entries share some similarities with journalism. To start with, they are both about finding the truth of some issues, events and individuals. They are both about publication of information and individual’s urge to share it, thus keeping other people informed of issues, events and individuals that matter to them. Both give voice to those who care.

Another important similarity is the emphasis on verifiability of published information. Good journalism should provide information that has been and can be verified, partly for the accuracy and partly for the reason that if other people would like to pursue the subject further, they can do so with the verified facts. Wikipedia’s content are required to be verifiable.

Perhaps this is the reason that the article “Courts turn to wikipedia, but selectively” said that more courts acknowledge the accuracy of entries in wikipedia and use them for “soft facts” so that people can better appreciate the context of cases.

Apart from verifiability, the other two wikipedia’s content policies are “no original research” and “neutral point of view”. They emphasize citing reliable sources and neutrality in information. I believe these are also what good journalism is about.

Wikipedia is about peer production, according to an article “Getting rich off those who work for free” by Justin Fox in Time magazine, March 5, 2007. Wikipedia is a good example of bringing together dispersed information and provides access to information that might otherwise be inaccessible to many people. Maybe another similarity is that wikipedia relies on many people who are willing to work for free and in a funny way, journalists also do. As Mr Fox said, journalists interview people who are not paid for their information or comments.  

As part of the further research for the subject of my final project (the changes undergone by buddhist associations and their activities in Hong Kong since the handover) of the New Media course, I have done some intensive browsing and found the following blogs and sites dedicated to Buddhism with feeds.

Global news

The Buddhist Channel - this site contains news items related to Buddhist organisations and groups all over the world. The other one is the religion sectionof Global Voices Online - again it keeps me up-to-date with news of all major religions. These are good information resources to keep me posted on the latest developments. They enable me to have a better understanding of religions and how are they related to aspects of of our daily life.

Personal blogs

As for personal blogs by buddhists with feeds, I could only find two so far. They are Buddha Warrior and Vincent Lai’s Impermanence blog. Buddha Warrior is operated by a Hong Kong Chinese named Raymond Lam who shares his thoughts about Buddha’s teachings and reflects on how they are applied to everyday life. Vincent Lai, who is a university undergraduate in the UK,  uses this blog to keep his journals and I am looking out for comments in his blog from Hong Kong bloggers.

It seems rather difficult to locate Hong Kong personal blogs with feeds. I have found the University of Hong Kong Centre for Buddhist Studies’ alumni association blog. However there is no feed function. I plan to ask professors at the HKU’s buddhist studies centre to recommend a few active ones. I will also contact organizations listed in this directory of buddhist centres in Hong Kong.
 

Because I would like to keep myself informed of any new buddhism-related activities in Hong Kong, I will visit the following websites from time to time:

News of activities and events and government policies

Website of Home Affairs Bureau

Associations

Website of Hong Kong Buddhist Association

Academic study and activities

Website of the HKU’s Centre for Buddhist Studies

Website of the Centre for the Studies of Humanistic Buddhism at Chinese University of Hong Kong

Social services

Website of the Buddhist Youth Association in Hong Kong

Website of Buddhist Association Children and Youth Centre

Just imagine life before RSS -  sipping a cup of tea or coffee in the early morning, you - the infowarrior - are sorting through a dozen newspapers on the breakfast table, while CNN or BBC is blaring through the speakers of your TV set. These days with RSS - your personal newsreader assistant who never complains and does not have “moods” - all the latest news items from the news publications and channels you trust the most are neatly organised in various folders waiting for you. Not just in the morning but practically round the clock. All you need to do is to log on to your personal news page. I am not the infowarrior as described by J.D. Lasica, but I certainly appreciate the efficiency and focus that RSS has brought to our life.

It is more efficient to look at news items in the newsreader as I do not need to navigate through the various sections of the a news organization’s site to get to what I want. The newsreader gives me immediate access to piece of news I am interested in learning more about. In some web sites, an advertisement page will appear when you click a news item (NY Times site does this), you are required to click an icon on the advertisement page to go to the page of the news item. News feeds do not play this sort of trick on you. I can also tag the news items for future reference.  

Although it was introduced in 1999, some news organizations have yet to adopt the technology. For example I wanted to subscribe to the feeds from China Daily for some business news, but it does not offer any feed for the moment. The four sites recommended by Rebecca have varying degrees of RSS utilisation.  

BBC’s News Feeds - to encourage users to make use of its news feeds function, the homepage of BBC’s site has in its centre the RSS icon. Just click About News Feeds and the users can subscribe to feeds in various sections. However, it only offers RSS format. From this site, I have selected the Front Page News. In its Feed Factory site, users can subscribe to news feeds of published articles as well as video clips. I like the cheerful design of this page, which reminds me of some kindergarten picture books. It makes it look like it is really easy to get feeds. I have noticed that there is no link connecting the homepage of BBC to its Feed Factory site, which seems to be an oversight.

In the New York Times’ site, the RSS icon can be found at the bottom of the page. The site divides its news feeds in two broad categories: news and features and then further breaks them down into sub-categories by alphabetical order. It is very clear.  

 The Standard in Hong Kong has its simple RSS page that offers news items as soon as they have been uploaded to the site. I believe the web team should refine this page by categorising the news items. Standard’s news feeds have not taken full advantage of RSS - they do not feed the subscribers with specific categories of news items, though the feeds arrive at their readers at realtime.

South China Morning Post only offers RSS in Podcast and I think it has lagged behind other English-language news organisations like The Standard in Hong Kong and The Nation in the region.     

Feeds are like professional newsclipping services that are free-of-charge. In addition to reports from established news organisations, we can get information from bloggers. It complements search engines like google by delivering the information we want to us directly and as soon as it becomes available.

I think that feeds - or the provision of feeds by organisations and their use by readers/ subscribers - might push the race of breaking news to an even higher level. The news organisations will become even keener in beating one and another in breaking news because feeds are as much about efficiency as they are about convenience. Headlines will become even more important because they are the first element that competes for user’s attention among hundreds of other items in the newsreader. But at the end of the day journalistic values will remain the same despite technological innovations.

By the way, I have also explored some other news organisations’ websites and subscribed to some of their news feeds.

International Herald Tribune’s site draws users’ attention to its RSS by putting it in its banner on the top of the homepage. Users can choose from RSS or Atom feed formats. IHT also recomends four news feed readers. I have picked the business news section feed.

At CNN.com - the impression its gives to me is that the site’s emphasis is on videos. I have had to scroll down to the bottom of the homepage to find the RSS. I have subscribed to the technology and business news feeds.

At nationmultimedia.com, site of the independent English-language newspaper in Bangkok The Nation, the RSS icons are at the lower left-hand corners of major section boxes. In addition, it has a dedicated RSS feed page. I have subscribed to the headline news feed.

What are the changes that Buddhism, Buddhist organisations/ temples and their activities in Hong Kong have undergone since the handover in 1997?

Under the leadership of the former chief executive Tung Chee Hwa, the SAR government formally recognized the influence of Buddhism in Hong Kong - its followers consitute the largest group of religious followers in the city. In 1997 the SAR government designated one public holiday in May or June to mark Buddha’s birthday, which replaced the Queen’s birthday. This year Buddha’s birthday is on May 24th. Tung himself is a Buddhist and participated in major, widely publicised Buddhist activities in Hong Kong and China. The leadership of mainstream Buddhist organizations in Hong Kong have aligned themselves with the city’s establishment. Several were on the Basic Law drafting committee.

There is also a commercial aspect to it. For example, the latest tourist attraction Ngong Ping Skyrail is built around a Buddhism theme, featuring sites of the Wisdom Path and the Po Lin Monastery. 

Academic studies and research of Buddhism in Hong Kong have thrived over the past 10 years. The University of Hong Kong has a Centre of Buddhist Studies. The Chinese University of Hong Kong also has a Centre for the Study of Humanistic Buddhism.

The above are just some facts. In the following week, I would like to gather more information on this subject and see if I would be able to develop it into my final project for this course.

The questions and answers section of Mr Bob Dietz’s talk last night, who was in Hong Kong to promote the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual report, was thought-provoking. One item discussed was the killing of a journalist Lan Chengzhang by thugs when he was “doing his job” reporting on illegal coal mines in Shanxi province in China. What originally seemed to be a case of a journalist sacrificing his life for journalistic truth took a different turn when it was later revealed that Mr Lan might have visited the mine to get more than just information of illegal coal mining. The editor of China Trade News, which employed Lan at the time, said he had not asked Lan to go to cover illegal coal mining in Shanxi.

According to a report by Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor , Shanxi government officials launched a campaign against “fake journalists” who extort money from mine owners in return for not reporting their activities. Blackmailing by “fake journalists” has become a growing industry in China. The respected Southern Weekly (a more independent newspaper in China) quoted a former Shanxi bureau chief of China Trade News as saying that reporters had been expected to bring in 100,000 yuan (around US$12,500) each in 2006, of which they could keep a third, continued Mr Ford’s report.

Mr Dietz said CPJ approached officials in Shanxi in its investigation of Lan’s case. I just wonder, due to the dubious motive of Lan’s visit to the illegal coal mines in Shanxi, whether it would be better if CPJ referred this case to some human rights organization instead. If the allegation by the Shanxi provincial government turns out to be true, this case is about criminals extorting money from other criminals and my question is why should CPJ get involved? Mr Dietz answered this in part by saying the CPJ looked at cases when someone was killed when he/she appeared to be doing a journalistic job. As people in a profession that the public relies upon to find out the truth, CPJ should find out the “true” motives behind these “journalists’ reporting activities” before allocating resources to pursue the cases. In the Philippines, there were a few cases of kilings of journalists. A majority of these cases involve radio broadcast journalists in the provinces and they were employed by politicians to use the broadcast as a forum to attack their political rivals. Are they “true journalists” or just “some people working for propaganda organizations”?

Another issue discussed at Mr Dietz talk was a strategy by international news organizations to outsource risk by employing locals to cover very dangerous conflicts, like Iraq. CPJ reported 32 journalists killed on the job in Iraq, and out of them 30 were Iraqis. This is an ethical dilemma. One can say it is “outsourcing the risks”. Or one can say that a news organization sends locals to do something so dangerous because its is too risky to send its own reporters, that the costs are too high if its own reporters are killed while on duty. Mr Dietz and Arnold, another veteran journalist at the talk, responded to my question by saying locals know how to deal with the situation better than foreign correspondents, they have their network of contacts, how they get their adrenalin rush and job satisfaction, etc. But no one wants to get killed on the job. Were these locals died while on duty given adequate protection and clear guidance about when to stop? Doesn’t the statistics just show what the real situation is?     

Just have had a quick look at the Financial Times’ website, and feel amazed how an institution established more than a century ago has continued to develop to keep up with the latest trends. I believe the change is necessary as younger people do prefer getting news updates online. More companies (that have had their fingers burnt, including my previous employer) have put the bad memory of the Internet bubble behind them and again become interested in investing in Internet websites these days, but at the end of the day it is the sustainable advertising revenues that make websites a viable commercial product. According to an article in the State of the News Media, online revenues of newspapers’ sites still have a long way to go before they can match the numbers generated by the print editions. One of the FT’s editors reminded us at the workshop that the print edition still accounts for over 90% of the newspaper’s total revenue. The outlook seems positive. A securities firm Piper Jaffray in the US has predicted significant growth in online advertising revenues, this is exciting for any journalists who want to build a career in a new medium. In the article “Go to the web, young journalist!”, Anthony talks about preparing for the new job market. Podcast, video and blogs, online journalism is so much about multimedia and I am glad that we have the chance to learn the basic skills here at JMSC.

I think the online edition of a publication, be it a newspaper or a periodical, needs to offer something additional. As one comment to the above article says, “the idea of combining community outreach with online journalism is interesting”. It is more than that - it is this interaction between a publication and its audience that helps to bring out the “truth”, as we have learnt in the course Critical Issues. Check out the website of the independent newspaper based in Bangkok The Nation   and check out its webblog where its columnists and editors host their blogs. Isn’t it rewarding that a journalist can get realtime feedback from his/her readers? It also gives a voice to the community.

How is Internet changing journalism in Hong Kong?

Internet and blogs, on several occasions, have prompted the local media to react to some incidents. In my opinion, the episode of “Bus Uncle” video, was an example that bloggers uncovered a social phenomenon and provided a lead for the print media to follow up.

Another example is Joey Yung (recording artist/ actress) vs Victor & Rolf. After appearing in a facsimile copy of a ballet tutu dress featured in the designer duo’s latest 07 collection and being criticised for it, Ms Yung said she would ask her costume designer not to copy other people’s creations “100%”. Her remark prompted calls from bloggers for her to apologise and they said that she does not have any concept about intellectual property rights. Again the local newspapers picked up this lead originating from the Internet. The traditional media are increasingly being led by the Internet, they pick up more and more leads from the Internet.

I just wonder if Donald Tsang has set up a blog for his Hong Kong’s Chief Executive election campaign. If not, I would urge him to go to uniblogs.org and set it up right away.