Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Media Standards Trust updates its “churnalism” tools
- Who edits breaking news articles on Wikipedia?
- From Nieman Reports: How chunqiu bifa’s puns and homophones let Chinese media play cat-and-mouse with censors
| Media Standards Trust updates its “churnalism” tools Posted: 12 Feb 2014 11:53 AM PST
The backend of Churnalism.com has been rebuilt and split into various components. Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust, said in an email that the Churnalism browser extension borrows code from a similar U.S. version of the extension released by the Sunlight Foundation: Moore said the trust is working on improvements to journalist profiles on Journalisted, its website featuring information on journalists from British news organizations (which we wrote about in 2010), and Unsourced, a browser extension that highlights missing sources in news articles. |
| Who edits breaking news articles on Wikipedia? Posted: 12 Feb 2014 10:30 AM PST What can we learn from examining the networks of users who edit articles on Wikipedia? That’s the question Brian Keegan, a post-doctoral fellow at Northeastern University, is asking, and he gave a presentation of some of his findings at Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society this week. Keegan discussed some of the same themes in a piece published in the Lab a little more than a year ago, but he shared some interesting findings on the different roles editors take on in editing articles on Wikipedia.Keegan looked at 3,000 articles about natural disasters, plane crashes, and other breaking news events and found that there is a solid core group of editors who work together and consistently edit articles about these events within the first 24 hours after they break. Then other editors swoop in and edit those articles once they’re no longer fast-changing news stories. Interestingly though, Keegan found a third group of editors who focus on a single topic — he highlighted WikiProject Tropical Cyclones — who will edit articles, breaking or not, on the topic that interests them. So members of the cyclone group (their motto: “Wanna go for a spin?”) will get involved in newsier articles if, say, a hurricane is about to hit somewhere — but they’re also interested in editing historical and scientific articles about tropical storms. |
| Posted: 12 Feb 2014 07:00 AM PST Editor’s note: The new issue of our sister publication Nieman Reports is out and online. There’s a lot of great reading in there on a variety of subjects, but the primary focus is on the state of journalism in China, with a number of terrific reports from both Chinese journalists and foreign correspondents posted there. This week, we’ll be sharing excerpts from some of those stories that would be of the most interest to Nieman Lab readers. Here, Yang Xiao, a 2014 Nieman Fellow and Beijing correspondent for China’s Southern People Weekly, writes about the linguistic tricks Chinese journalists use to express their opinions and asks if they’re just another form of self-censorship.
Twenty-five years after Tiananmen, the practice highlights two aspects of China's liberal media: the familiar story of oppression and the increasingly popular tactic of circumventing censorship through the venerable Chinese tradition of chunqiu bifa, expressing critical opinions in subtle linguistic ways. In early 2013, for example, when journalists at the liberal Southern Weekly went on strike to protest government censorship of their New Year's editorial, other publications supported them via chunqiu bifa. One story in the Beijing News lifestyle section extolled the author's love of "southern porridge." In Chinese, the word for "porridge" is zhou, a homophone of the first character in the "Weekend" part of Southern Weekend's name. Readers knew the author's fondness for southern porridge was really a fondness for the beleaguered newspaper. When I worked at the state-run Xinhua News Agency from 2004 to 2008, I became fairly adept at chunqiu bifa. I used puns, metaphors and homophones — any kind of linguistic trick I could think of — to express my approval or disapproval. Later on, at Southern People Weekly, one of China's most influential national newsmagazines (part of the Southern Media Group that also includes Southern Weekly and another liberal paper, Southern Metropolitan Daily), I wrote a lot of sensitive features that relied on my chunqiu bifa skills. At first, I enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game with censors. I thought, "There will always be someone who can read between the lines." But now, I worry that this kind of expression will create in me a vicious circle of complacency, in which I know my efforts to speak freely will be fruitless but can console myself with at least having tried. I fear that, in China's increasingly complicated and ambiguous media environment, chunqiu bifa may be changing from a means of dissent into a tool of inadvertent self-censorship that may ultimately deprive us of the ability to face the truth. Keep reading at Nieman Reports » |
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In China, May has 35 days. All mention of June 4th, the day in 1989 on which the Tiananmen Square massacre took place, is forbidden. So Chinese journalists and bloggers get around the ban online by talking about what happened on May 35th.| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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