Barry Kalb

Instructor: Barry Kalb

Barry Kalb, lecturer in journalism at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, and author of the highly regarded handbook You Can Write Better English, will discuss the errors that native Chinese speakers routinely make when writing English, how these errors should be corrected, and why good written English is essential in today’s globalized world.

Date: June 15 and 16
Time: 09:30am -12:30pm
Venue: JMSC Shanghai Centre: 298 North Suzhou Road, Hongkou District, Shanghai, China 200085

Please register here.

Dr. Rogier Creemers

Dr. Rogier Creemers, Research Officer at the University of Oxford’s Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy, will deliver a talk at the JMSC on Friday, May 3, on China’s recent efforts to raise its international standing through soft power.

For the past several years, China has been using soft power, the ability to influence foreign countries by means other than force or bribery, as a way to complement its expanding economic and political strength.

China’s leaders have spent billions of dollars on aid and development projects in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast and Central Asia.

They have opened hundreds of Confucius Institutes around the world to promote China’s culture and language. They have also granted thousands of scholarships to foreign students to come and study in China.

At the same time, however, China has been repeatedly criticized by the Western media for censorship, pollution and human rights abuses.

Has China’s soft power campaign been successful? Do foreigners see China in a better light? What challenges does China face from Western journalists? These are some of the questions Creemers will discuss.

Prior to joining the University of Oxford, Creemers was the Euro-Asian Law and Business Studies’s Executive Programme Coordinator at the University of Maastricht. He holds two Masters of Arts degrees from the University of Leuven, in Sinology and International Relations, and a Doctoral degree in Law from the University of Maastricht.

He edits the China Copyright and Media website, an online resource for information about Chinese law and policy regarding public communication.

Details of the event are below.

Talk: Keep Quiet and Listen! China’s Soft Power Efforts and Foreign Observers

Date: Friday, May 3, 2013
Time: 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Venue: Shum Wai Yau Reading Room, Eliot Hall, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, HKU
Speaker: Rogier Creemers, Research Officer, Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, University of Oxford

This talk is open to all JMSC students, alumni and staff.

This year’s awards ceremony will take place on Thursday, June 6 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai.

Networking cocktails will be served at 6:30pm. The gala dinner will start at 7:30pm.

The awards, which have been called the “Pulitzer Prizes in Asia”, will honour the best journalism in print, digital and new media in the Asia-Pacific region in the past year. The JMSC has been the administrator of the awards since 2011.

Tickets may be purchased online at sopawards.com. The reservation rates: HK$2,250 for SOPA members and HK$2,500 for general admission. An early bird package is available through April 30 offering a 12-seat table for the cost of 10 individual tickets.

The awards will recognise excellence in journalism in a variety of areas including Investigative Reporting, Human Rights Reporting, Reporting on the Environment, News Photography, Feature Photography, Information Graphics, Multimedia News Presentation and Magazine Design.

Awards will also be presented for Journalist of the Year and Scoop of the Year, which honours an exclusive story.

Special guest speakers David Barboza, The New York Times‘s Shanghai Bureau Chief, and Michael Forsythe, Senior Reporter for Bloomberg News Beijing, will participate in a discussion moderated by Bloomberg TV correspondent Robyn Meredith.

Barboza won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his story on the hidden wealth that was amassed by former premier Wen Jiabao’s family members. Forsythe is the co-author of the book, China’s Superbank: Debt, Oil, and Influence – How China Development Bank is Rewriting the Rules of Finance.

For more information visit the SOPA 2013 Awards website.

Journalist Irene Jay Liu will be discussing Reuters’ Connected China at the JMSC on Friday, April 19.

Irene Jay Liu, news editor for data at Thomson Reuters, will deliver a talk at the JMSC on Connected China, a new website that tracks the changing relationships among China’s governing elite, on Friday, April 19.

Connected China uses the tools of computer science, like HTML 5 and interactive graphics, to examine “the social and professional networks of China’s leaders”, Liu said, “highlighting the interpersonal relationships that drive business, move markets and shape the political landscape in the world’s most populous nation”.

The website, which was released by Reuters at the end of February, is divided into three main sections – Social Power, Institutional Power, and Career Comparison.

Social Power illustrates the power of China’s political leaders and traces how the leaders are connected. Each leader’s power is calculated by algorithms based on personal connections, family connections, and current and past government positions, gauging how those factors may be contributing to the rise or fall of a career.

Institutional Power shows how the Chinese government is organized and examines its officials and hierarchical relationships to determine which departments are more powerful than others.

Career Comparison compares the career paths of Communist party members.

Connected China also contains current news, in-depth articles, and a timeline of historical events that were economically, politically, and socially important to provide people with little or no knowledge of China with more understanding of the country.

How did current leaders get their power? Who will be a leader in the future? These are some of the questions explored by the website.

Liu will discuss the development of Connected China and how it uses traditional reporting in a new digital format that may become a model for combining data and visual storytelling techniques in the future.

Prior to joining Reuters, Liu covered politics for the Albany Times Union‘s Capitol Bureau and was a senior reporter at the South China Morning Post, where she led the WhoRunsHK project, which tracked how the most powerful organizations and people in Hong Kong were connected. Liu holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Yale University and a Master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University. She is teaching a public course on data journalism at the JMSC in May.

Details of the event are below.

Talk: An Overview of Reuters’ Connected China Website

Date: Friday, April 19, 2013
Time: 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Venue: Digital Media Lab, G/F, Eliot Hall, Journalism and Media StudiesCentre, HKU
Speaker: Irene Jay Liu, News Editor for Data, Thomson Reuters

This talk is open to all JMSC students, alumni and staff.

This year’s conference, entitled New.Now.Next (N3), will take place at Hong Kong University from May 24 to 26. It has been expanded from one to two days to offer a variety of hands-on mobile and digital workshops and one of Hong Kong’s first journalism job fairs.

The conference will bring together media experts, academics, entrepreneurs, and journalists from around the world to discuss what is important in media now and in the future.

Registration is online at www.n3con.com. The registration rates: HK$150 for AAJA members and JMSC students and alumni, HK$500 for general admission, and HK$600 for those who register on the day of the event.

“This year we’ll be spotlighting countries that have made ripples across Asia in the past year”, said Ramy Inocencio, Asia Business Analyst for CNN International and Vice President of AAJA-Asia, who is chief organizer of the conference. ”Our central panels [focus] on investigative reporting in China [...], a look at the state of North Korea following the consolidation of power of leader Kim Jong-Un [...], and Myanmar, where recent reforms have spurred business, tourism and international media interest”.

There will also be panels on important new directions in media, such as data journalism, which uses computer science to gather, analyze and visualize news stories hidden in large amounts of on-line information.

Guest speakers will include Paul Cheung, Global Editor for the Associated Press and President of AAJA; Kristie Lu Stout, an award-winning correspondent and host of CNN’s nightly news program News Stream; Sasa Vucinic, the founder of IndieVoices, a crowd funding platform that raises money to support independent media in developing nations; and Ying Chan, the founder and Director of the JMSC.

The job fair will be the first organized by AAJA-Asia or the JMSC. The Associated Press, Time, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, CNN International, Reuters, and the South China Morning Post have been invited to attend.

More information on the 2013 Media Conference may be found on the N3 website.

Angela Doland

Date and Time: June 1, 2, and 10, 11, 2013, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Venue: HKU Shanghai Study Centre

Language: English

Enrollment deadline: May 15

Course Fee: HK$3,500  |  Early Bird Fee: HK$2,500 (Before April 10^th)

Course Description:

Whether you’re working on a travel story, a personal narrative or a serious journalistic feature, there’s one ingredient that will take your writing to a higher level: storytelling. The best reporters and non-fiction writers set scenes. Their characters face dilemmas. Their stories keep us riveted and have as much suspense as any fictional tale. In this four-day class, spread out over two weekends, we’ll do in-class writing exercises to break free of conventions and think about narrative.

We’ll workshop your stories. Using real-life examples from writers and reporters, we’ll talk about how to find and develop ideas, how to structure pieces and how to research stories in ways that make the telling easier, whether you’re working on travel features, memoirs, profiles or business stories. And we’ll unravel great writing by Peter Hessler, Barbara Demick, Atul Gawande, Gene Weingarten and others. How exactly do they do it?

Registration and credit card payment here.

For questions and the course fee bank transfer instruction, please send inquire to jmscsh@hku.hk, or call Lily Lu, director of JMSC Shanghai Centre, at (086)137 6134 2815.

Intended Learning Outcomes: By the end of the course, students should be able to:

• Write narratives that hook readers and keep them engaged
• Use advanced interview and research techniques to help stories come alive
• Complete two polished, convincing story pitches that will grab editors’ attention, and draw up a plan for reporting and writing the stories

Teacher’s Bio:

Angela Doland is a Shanghai-based journalist who has reported from Europe, Asia and Africa. In China, she contributes to outlets including CNN Travel and Advertising Age. Previously, she worked for 12 years as a Paris correspondent for Associated Press, covering events from the Concorde crash to the Cannes Film Festival, from terrorism in Morocco to a royal coronation in Monaco. She once flew to Tahiti to chase a missing basketball star; on another assignment, she joined Italian priests for an exorcism workshop. Doland holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Syllabus:

Day 1: Introduction to storytelling

• What is a feature story?
• Generating ideas. You can write about anything, but let’s face it: Some ideas are better than others
• Subject vs. theme
• The nutgraph — the “why” of the story
• Moral dilemmas, turning points, crises
• Discussion: your stories. (Each student will come to the first class with a 200-word story about something that once happened to them. There are no guidelines beyond this: Every story has a beginning, middle and an end).

Day 2: Before you write — great writing starts with great reporting

• Reporting — going beyond the basics
• Background
• Using documents and photographs
• The writer’s place in the story
• The art of the interview
• In-class interview and writing exercise

Day 3: The beginning, middle and end

• The lede
• Suspense
• Re-creating scenes
• Tone and voice
• In-class writing exercise: observing a scene and writing about it

Day 4: Getting your story out there

• Choosing a media outlet
• Writing in the tone of your publication
• Each outlet has its own persona
• Examples of great story pitches
• In-class exercise: workshopping your pitches
• Wrapping it all up

Professor George Brock, Professor and Head of Journalism, City University London

George Brock, Professor and Head of the Department of Journalism at City University London, will deliver a talk at the JMSC on Tuesday, March 19 on the impact that declining newspaper circulation and the News International phone hacking scandal have had on British journalism.

National newspaper sales in the United Kingdom have been plummeting for over a decade.

They have continued to decline after the Leveson Inquiry into the practises and ethics of the British press published a report recommending state regulation of the media last November.

The inquiry followed revelations that journalists at some parts of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire hacked into citizens’ phones to break stories, and allegations that some journalists bribed police and public officials.

Tuesday’s talk will review the events leading up to these crises and “ask whether the British press will ever be the same again”.

During his 28-year career at The Times, Brock held a range of positions including feature writer, foreign editor, Brussels bureau chief, European Editor, Managing Editor, and International Editor. He is a member of the International Press Institute‘s executive board and a board member of the World Editors Forum.

Professor Brock is on Twitter at @georgeprof and maintains a blog at georgebrock.net. His academic staff profile on the City University London website may be found here. A lecture on the future of journalism education Brock gave at the European Journalism Centre in 2010 may be viewed here.

Details of the event are below.

Talk: The double squeeze on British journalism: the phone-hacking scandal and the decline of print.

Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Time: 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Venue: Digital Media Lab, G/F, Eliot Hall, Journalism and Media StudiesCentre, HKU
Speaker: Professor George Brock, Professor and Head of Journalism, City University London

The talk is open to JMSC students and faculty.

While the two cultures have different traditions and at first glance seem to be filled with contradictions and misunderstandings, Stray says that the stereotypes are wrong and there is a lot of common ground. ”At the core of journalism, there’s something about representing ideas to the public, and about enforcing accountability”, says Stray. “But engineers, and computer scientists, and statisticians want to do that too”.

It is important to build even more bridges between computer science and journalism in order to gather information, sift through data, and be able to discover stories and present them to an audience successfully in the digital age says Stray.

His talk highlights the areas of journalism where the techniques of computer science are becoming as essential as they are useful.

This presentation, ”Computer Science and Journalism: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together“, was given at the JMSC’s Digital Media Lab on Monday, February 4, 2013. Please click on the video below to watch the full lecture.

Stray has been in Hong Kong for the past month teaching the JMSC’s first Computational Journalism class. He was the AP’s Interactive Technology Editor from 2010 to 2012. Prior to this, he was a freelance journalist in Hong Kong, and a senior computer scientist for Adobe Systems. His articles have appeared in Wired, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and China Daily.

Stray is on Twitter at @jonathanstray and blogs at jonathanstray.com/.

Shanghai Public Lecture

Media training basics: 7 tips on how (and how not) to get your message out

Longtime Associated Press reporter Angela Doland shares a journalist’s perspective on how business people, PR executives and anyone else can get their message to media effectively. How can you avoid being misquoted? What do you say on camera when you don’t know the answer to a question? And what exactly are the ground rules when talking “off the record?”

Angela Doland

About the speaker:

Angela Doland is a Shanghai-based journalist who has reported from Europe, Asia and Africa. In China, she contributes to outlets including Advertising Age and CNN Travel. Previously, she worked for 12 years as a Paris correspondent for Associated Press, covering events from the Concorde crash to the Cannes Film Festival, from terrorism in Morocco to a royal coronation in Monaco. She once flew to Tahiti to chase a missing basketball star; on another assignment, she joined Italian priests for an exorcism workshop. Doland holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Date: April 6, 2013 (Saturday)

Time: 2 – 4 p.m.
Venue: HKU Shanghai Study Centre, 1st Floor Lecture Hall, 298 North Suzhou Road (北苏州路298号) Hongkou District, Shanghai.
Speaker: Angela Doland, Associated Press reporter
Language: English
Cost: Free
Registration is required

Please click here to register online or email JMSCSH@hku.hk to reserve a place.

Ken Ellingwood

Journalism & Media Studies Centre invite you to

Shanghai Public Lecture

Covering the World When the rules keep Changing By Ken Ellingwood

Ken Ellingwood, an award-winning former correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who has reported from some of the world’s hot spots, discusses how traditional U.S. media seek to stay relevant in a hyper-fast digital age in which even wars now lack recognizable battle lines.

Ellingwood, based in Jerusalem from 2003 to 2008, reported from the front lines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as from Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. He worked from the newspaper’s Mexico City bureau from 2008 to 2012, reporting widely on Mexico’s violent drug war. Ellingwood was part of a team of Times reporters that won the Overseas Press Club’s top news award, and other prizes, for its Mexico coverage. He contributed to coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake for which the newspaper won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in international reporting. Ellingwood is the author of “Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border” and currently on the faculty at Nanjing University.

Date: March 9, 2013 (Saturday)
Time: 2 – 4 p.m.
Venue: HKU Shanghai Study Centre, 1st Floor Lecture Hall, 298 North Suzhou Road (北苏州路298号) Hongkou District, Shanghai.
Speaker: Ken Ellingwood, an award-winning former foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times
Language: English
Cost: Free
Registration is required

Please click here to register online or email JMSCSH@hku.hk to reserve a place.