Ruby Yang speaking at the JMSC.

Ruby Yang, an Oscar-winning filmmaker, is at the JMSC this month teaching a course on the craft and art of documentary filmmaking.

The course, which ends May 31, is guiding students through the process of digital editing and documentary post-production.

Yang said that editing is one of the most important parts of filmmaking, but is often overlooked.

“Students are usually very good at filming and getting material,” she said, “but they tend to put a lot of stuff in without crafting the narrative or focusing the theme of their work. I’m teaching students … how to combine those ingredients so that they are able to reach an audience while remaining true to their subject matter.”

Yang won an Academy Award for her short film, The Blood of Yingzhou District, which follows a group of children in China’s Anhui province whose parents died of AIDS. Their parents had contracted the disease through faulty techniques that were used when they donated blood for money to supplement their incomes.

The film helped bring international attention to the spread of AIDS in Anhui, which officials estimate to have infected between 10,000 and 50,000 people by 2005.

After the film was released, then-Premier Wen Jiabao invited a group of children whose lives had been impacted by AIDS to Beijing on World AIDS day in 2006. Two years later, he continued to show his concern for the situation by traveling to Anhui, where he shook hands with some of the children Yang had featured in the film.

Yang, who was born in Hong Kong, said that the film is an example of what she attempts to do in all of her work – to combine filmmaking with social justice and advocacy work.

She moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, she said, and “as I got to know the history of Chinese Americans and the unfairness and discrimination they faced, it made me want to document injustices in a way … to make people aware of them, to change attitudes, to inspire people to action.”

Yang currently lives in Beijing, where she is the director of the Chang Ai Media Project, an independent company she co-founded to produce documentaries and public service ads addressing health issues in China.

Olivia Rosenman (MJ, 2013) and Sophie Brown (MJ, 2013) at TEDxVictoriaHarbor where they filmed the talks with three other JMSC students.

Five JMSC students recently got the chance to work on an international project that has an audience in the millions when they interned at TEDxVictoriaHarbour, an annual travel and tourism conference in Hong Kong. The conference operates under license from TED, a nonprofit that promotes such events around the world.

Sherry Zhang (MJ, 2013), Sophie Brown (MJ, 2013), Olivia Rosenman (MJ, 2013), Justine Tai (BJ, 2013) and Linn Schjerven (BJ, 2013) were hired through the JMSC’s internship programme to record this year’s conference, whose theme was “E-Motion: the how and why we travel, and how it will evolve in the future.”

Tai and Schjerven worked as still photographers during the conference. Zhang, Brown and Rosenman filmed the speaker’s presentations and are currently editing the footage for publication online. The talks will be uploaded over the summer to the official TEDx Youtube account, which regularly records tens of millions of views.

One of the core principles of the JMSC is to provide students with opportunities to put the digital and technical skills they are learning in the classroom into practice in real-world, professional work environments.

Zhang, who is from Shanghai, said that opportunities like this were one of the reasons she chose to come to the JMSC. “We learn a lot in the classroom, then we learn a lot more by going out and doing stuff professionals do, totally hands on,” she said. “It gives us a great combination of theory and practice. And the internships that the JMSC can provide are pretty impressive.”

The internships allow students to connect with working members of the international media and to receive training from them. One of the speakers at the conference was Dean Head, an Australian filmmaker whose documentaries have been on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic. “He helped us set up and took the time to advise us on lighting and how to get the best shots,” said Rosenman, who is also from Australia.

Every summer, journalism students leave the JMSC with reporting and technical skills that equip them to work in a variety of old and new media. For some, testing their newfound skills in the tough, traditional newspaper environment still holds the greatest allure, and one such news outlet, the Phnom Penh Post, has become a popular proving ground for JMSC graduates and current students alike.

Justin Heifetz (MJ ’11), Paola Barisani (MJ ’12) and Anne Renzenbrink (MJ ’12) all started working at Cambodia’s main English-language daily soon after graduation. Heifetz joined the Post as a web editor in charge of crucial changes at the paper, including redesigning the site to allow breaking news in real time, and adding a social media presence. He moved on to a similar role at the Post’s sister publication, The Myanmar Times, before joining Mizzima in Yangon.

Barisani had interned for the paper over her winter break and went back after graduation to take over from Heifitz, serving as the web editor through the spring of 2013. The role was a challenge for Barisani, who is from Italy and who, as a non-native English speaker, found the pace of online editing daunting. But she improved quickly and lauds the paper for trusting her with the role. “The Phnom Penh Post gives young reporters a chance to prove themselves in a tough environment. There are always numerous opportunities,” she said.

Paola Barisani, former web editor for the Post and MJ ’12.

Renzenbrink also interned for the paper before becoming a business reporter last fall and finding herself covering an area of the world where good business stories abound. “There are a bunch of interesting developments in the business sector, not just in Cambodia, but also regionally across South East Asia,” Renzenbrink said. Her articles, including a recent story describing China’s influence on Cambodia’s economy, are archived here.

Alan Parkhouse, an Australian, is the Post’s editor-in-chief. He has worked extensively in Asia Pacific and the UK as a sub-editor for such papers as The Bangkok Post, The Nation, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph and The Telegraph, and he has a theory about the allure of his current paper for students and graduates: “You gain a hell of a lot of experience – experience that they wouldn’t gain elsewhere – simply by the nature of the stories we get to report on in Cambodia. News here is much more cutting-edge and exciting because of the issues people face in Cambodia,” he said.

Those issues include a country that is still recovering from decades of civil war and genocide. Many of the paper’s stories involve land rights and human rights abuses. The U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal is in the process of trying the surviving leaders of the Cambodian communist party, which carried out the genocide – one of the biggest human rights court cases in history. Parkhouse said the paper rotates journalists, including interns and new recruits, to cover the proceedings.

The paper has two floors of office space in a small industrial estate minutes from the centre of Phnom Penh, and a printing press on the outskirts of town.  It employs about 200 people, many of whom speak Khmer and work in tandem with English-speaking reporters. The Post has a regular daily print readership of over 12,000, a number Parkhouse said is dwarfed by an online readership that he estimated as much as 100 times higher, largely due to the exodus of Cambodians who fled the Khmer Rouge regime and are now living outside of the country.

The Post has become something of a regional standout, winning seven international and domestic awards in 2012 alone, including prizes from the Society of Publishers in Asia and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. The paper’s only English-language competition is a small, pamphlet-like publication called the Cambodia Daily.

Anne Renzenbrink, business reporter for the Post and MJ ’12.

According to Parkhouse, the Cambodian press enjoys a level of freedom that is unusual in the region. “We don’t have any censorship here,” he said. “Occasionally, we get angry letters and phone calls from the government over stories we’ve run, but we’ve never been sued….There are no subjects that we cannot write about.”

The Post has been a popular internship destination for years. It’s especially appealing to students who want the opportunity to report and write multiple stories independently.

Current MJ Soo Jin Kim, who interned with the Post over the 2013 winter break, found a wide range of roles available to her at the paper. “The internship experience at Phnom Penh Post is very hands-on and exciting,” she said, “I worked for three desks: national, lifestyle, and business. I’ve done a wide range of work, from sub-editing, to pulling news wires, to editing the layout, to writing articles.”

Fellow MJ and 2013 winter intern Stephanie Ip said that the editors were “very open to your ideas and willing to let you write articles for them” – something she said she didn’t think a lot of other papers would to offer to novice journalists. Ip’s articles are archived here.

Parkhouse said interns are treated no differently than the rest of the reporting staff. They are given a few office-based days to get to know how things work, and are then sent right out on stories. “We coach them, give them contacts, and make sure they are provided with support. Editors make sure they are given all the help that they can. But they are encouraged to be, as quickly as they can, just another member of staff,” he said.

Heifetz thinks skilled graduates can really make a difference at papers like the Phnom Penh Post. The paper needs the up-to-date skills and experience that current JMSC graduates bring, he said, including online and data journalism skills. But, he warned: “If you want to be hand held, this isn’t the place for you.”

Anjani Trivedi (MJ, 2013) and Olivia Rosenman (MJ, 2013)

Two students in the JMSC’s Master of Journalism programme have been awarded an HKU Social Inclusion Activities Grant.

Anjani Trivedi (MJ, 2013) and Olivia Rosenman (MJ, 2013) won the grant, worth HK$26,000, for their proposal to raise public awareness of violence against women in Hong Kong and China.

The proposal consists of two main parts, which the two women are now working to produce: a website and a public forum.

The website will be designed to contain research, interviews, articles, and multimedia reports as well as short documentary films on sexual violence in China, the women said. It will also contain a section that analyzes how sexual violence is reported in the media, and assesses the wider social significance of what is included and excluded from such reports.

The forum, tentatively scheduled for the beginning of the next academic year, will aim to bring together academics, journalists, and social workers to examine the causes and consequences of sexual violence and discuss possible solutions to the problem.

“The goal of the project is to start a healthy dialogue about sexual violence in China,” Rosenman said. “There are thousands of sexual assaults every year, but people aren’t talking about it … because it’s seen as a private or domestic issue.”

The women said sexual violence is an issue that needs to be written about and discussed more accurately in order to promote the changes in social attitudes and government policies that are required to prevent it.

“Sexual violence and assault really get underreported in the media,” Trivedi said. “And when it is reported, it’s looked at from the perspective of who was assaulted, what happened, where did it take place.  The question of why it’s happening … the cultural conditions that allow or even encourage violence against women, don’t get looked at at all. That’s what we’re going to do: to look for the reasons.”

Trivedi said that the project was inspired in part by the gang rape last winter of a 23-year old Indian medical student, which she helped cover while an intern at the New York Times New Delhi Bureau. “That experience made me realize what a huge issue this is and that the media and public just aren’t talking about it,” she said.

The Social Inclusion Activities Grant was established by HKU Class of 1984 to support student projects that promote “harmony amongst members of the public” who are divided on the basis of race, gender, religion, or ethnic or cultural origins.

Award-winning photograph taken by Alex Hofford (MJ, 2012) of a Filipino fisherman compressor diving to tend to a net full of skipjack tuna.

Alex Hofford, who is the European Pressphoto Agency’s Chief Representative in Hong Kong, won the Award for Excellence in the Environment Picture Story category at the NPPA’s 2013 “Best of Journalism” competition, which concluded on Tuesday, April 23.

Hofford won the award for a series of photographs he took while on assignment for Greenpeace International, to document what Greenpeace calls destructive and illegal fishing practices in the Pacific ocean. Pictures from the series have also been published in the Discovery Channel Magazine.

Most of the photographs were shot over the course of four trips Hofford took on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza through international waters near the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The photographs were commissioned by Greenpeace in order to inform the public about the damage overfishing causes to the environment and to take legal action against companies that employ illegal fishing methods.

“It’s really a contest that is put on by photojournalists for photojournalists so the award is an acknowledgement from my peers,” Hofford said. “I am quite humbled by that. Looking at the other entries and the amazing work that was done — it’s incredible to be included in such illustrious company.”

Daniel Goodman, a photographer and videographer at Business Insider, won third place in the video category of NPPA’s Monthly Multimedia contest, for his report on US veteran Dennis Cadigan’s successful fight against addiction and homelessness, on March 1.

After losing his sight in 1968 during Operation Meade River, the largest helicopter assault of the Vietnam War, Cadigan overcame an addiction to painkillers and heroin to found Phoenix Woodworks, a specialty wood business that is owned and operated by disabled veterans. Goodman’s video profile of Cadigan was published on the Business Insider website in January.

The National Press Photographers Association is a US-based organization dedicated to promoting photojournalism and supporting the profession’s high standards for quality and ethics around the world.

Irene Jay Liu, Thomson Reuters news editor for data

The Internet is producing an abundance of information at an ever increasing rate, creating a demand for journalists who are able to combine the traditional skills of investigating, verifying, and reporting with the ability to understand and process large amounts of data quickly.

These new skills will be taught at the JMSC in May by Irene Jay Liu, Thomson Reuters‘s news editor for data.

The 12-day course will cover how to use computer tools to search through public documents for hidden information that is newsworthy. It will also teach how to present the results clearly and compellingly for a general audience.

Liu said she hopes to impress upon her students the importance of adding value to stories in ways that bloggers and amateur on-line reporters cannot.

With the advent of the Internet, she said, “everyone is committing acts of journalism” on a daily basis. However, journalists need to focus on the quality of their content, she said. “The techniques of data journalism provide the ability to add additional levels of insight to a subject” while still maintaining high standards of accuracy and integrity.

The course will be offered between May 7 and May 30 and is open to the public. Course details can be found on the JMSC Public Courses webpage. Registration is open until April 30 on a first-come-first-serve basis. Click here to register.

Liu, who holds a master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University, led the development of Reuters’ Connected China, a groundbreaking news website that uses interactive graphics to illustrate the changing relationships among China’s governing elite.

She said Connected China is an example of how data journalists are using digital techniques to redefine news, and to create something that has never been seen before. “Most news applications are for one news event and then don’t ever change after they are published. But life isn’t like that,” she said. “News is happening all the time, altering details of what was reported in the past and changing the light we see it in.”

“So we decided to make Connected China a living application. It’s driven by a database that is updated continuously… This is a way we can use data and technology to keep the news living and moving forward and also relevant.”

Nathan Griffiths (MJ, 2011), an interactive producer at the Associated Press in New York who helped create the AP’s interactive election maps during last year’s U.S. presidential election, credited Liu’s data course with giving him a new perspective on how to use knowledge he already had.

“Irene’s class really helped me see how all these tools, many of which, like Excel, I’d been installing, maintaining, and troubleshooting for years, could be used for journalism,” Griffiths said. “It was actually kind of inspiring to realize that many of the technical skills I’d learned over the years could be used for more than fixing a broken file server or crashed computer.”

“I don’t really think of data journalism as a field of journalism as much as a series of tools and techniques you will need to learn to use if you want to be a reporter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what kind of stories you want to cover, these days there’s going to be some kind of data on the subject, and probably more than you realize.”

Liu said news organizations are looking for journalists with data skills. “Everyone wants data. Everyone needs data. Everyone who is a journalist should understand data and has to learn how to do it. If you want a job in journalism, all you have to do is put the word data somewhere in your job title – and you will be employed.”

More information on upcoming courses the JMSC is offering to the public may be found here.

Pan Macmillan India has published Forever Young, a new book by Reenita Malhotra Hora (MJ, 2012).

JMSC alumnus Reenita Malhotra Hora will be hosting a book launch and signing of her new book, Forever Young: Unleashing the Magic of Ayurveda, at Dymocks bookstore in the International Finance Centre from 6:30pm to 8:00pm on Thursday, April 25.

The book is Hora’s third on Ayurveda, the 5,000-year-old Indian natural medicine system.

It is published by the Indian branch of Pan Macmillan, and provides guidelines, fitness routines and nutrition advice for improving health and well-being.

“In a nutshell, Ayurveda is to India what Chinese medicine is to China”, said Hora (MJ, 2012), a Hong Kong-based Ayurvedic clinician.

“Both are very holistic and based on harmonizing the mind and body with the environment, and involve lifestyle choices, diets, herbs, and stretches and exercises for healthier living”.

Hora, who also works at RTHK Radio 3 as a presenter for the Asian Threads radio show, and as a presenter and producer for the show Money for Nothing, explained that Ayurveda is a Sanskrit word meaning “science of life”.

“Ayurveda doesn’t just treat symptoms after you’ve gotten sick, it focuses on the way you live every day”, Hora said. “The premise is: if you live right, and live your life in harmony with the natural life of the universe, then you will always maintain your peak health”.

[Click on the video below to watch a trailer for the book.]

More information on Ayurveda and Forever Young, as well as details for Hora’s upcoming Ayurveda workshops, may be found on the book’s Facebook page.

Hora is on Twitter at @reenymal and blogs at reenita.com.

The courses, which will be taught in May and June, are intended for journalists and other working professionals who would like to acquire new skills or add to their existing knowledge of news writing, production, publishing and technology.

The courses will cover a range of topics from fundamentals like effective English-language writing to advanced subjects like data journalism, one of the new tools made possible by the digital age. Technical skills including documentary filmmaking, video shooting and editing, photography, and how to build and manage a website, will also be taught.

Registration is online at public-courses-2013. Registration deadlines and quotas vary. All of the courses are open to the public.

Instructors for the courses come from a variety of backgrounds and offer a wealth of professional experience.

Oscar-winning director Ruby Yang will teach a course on digital editing and documentary post-production. Yang won an Academy Award for her short film, The Blood of Yingzhou District, which follows a group of children in China’s Anhui province whose parents died after being diagnosed with AIDS.

Irene Jay Liu, news editor for data at Thomson Reuters, will teach data journalism. Students in the course will learn how to mine large numbers of documents for hidden information that can lead to news stories, and how to present those stories to an audience online. Liu led the recent launch of Reuters’ Connected China, a groundbreaking new website that tracks the changing relationships among China’s governing elite.

Other instructors include Chan Pui King, former Editor-in-Chief at Next Magazine and freelance reporter for the Center for Public Integrity; filmmaker Nancy Tong, who served as an associate producer and production manager for the film Who Killed Vincent Chin?, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1989; Lauren Dockett, an Honorary Lecturer at the JMSC and former Executive Editor for Columbia University Press; and Barry Kalb, who has been a journalist for over 40 years and covered many major stories including the Watergate scandal and the death of Mao Tse-tung.

A full list of the courses is below.

General courses: Data Journalism, You Can Write Better English, Investigative Journalism, Book Proposals that Work.

Technical courses: The Craft and Art of Documentary Filmmaking, Basic Video Shooting and Editing, Advanced Video Shooting and Editing, Web building with WordPress for beginners, Web management for self-hosted WordPress site (intermediate), Photo slideshow with audio for beginners, Basic News Photography, Documentary Video Production.

For more information, please visit the 2013 public courses webpage or contact Matthew Leung at jmsccos@hku.hk.

Xeni Jardin

The Internet has created a new kind of celebrity, turning writers who are able to produce compelling content and build vivid online identities into superstars.

Xeni Jardin, who spoke by Skype to the Journalism and Media Studies Centre’s Internet, Media and Society class on April 3, is one of those superstars.

A founding partner and co-editor of the popular group blog Boing Boing, which receives over five million unique visitors a month, Jardin is known for her intelligence and eloquence and is recognized as a leading member of the “digerati.”

Her identity took a sharp turn in 2011, when blogging about a routine visit to the doctor turned into an ongoing public odyssey of personal pain, struggle and courage: she revealed to her 70,000 Twitter followers that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Jardin said that the diagnosis became the most important story of her life, and it seemed natural to want to write her way through it online. It has added an urgency to her writing, she said, and blogging about the disease has given her comfort and hope.

“There is this sense that the Internet is temporary and the Internet is fleeting”, said Jardin, “but when you go through an experience [like breast cancer], you realize that life is very fleeting. And that oddly, now, the Internet offers a kind of permanence. A kind of ethereal but permanent repository of our lives … of these very intimate and very powerful thoughts.”

The decision to share something so personal online has also allowed her to connect to other cancer victims and survivors, who helped her through the painful and confusing treatment process.

The Internet, Media and Society course is taught by Jardin’s friend and former collaborator, Associate Professor Kevin Sites. He said Jardin’s comments made a profound impact on the class. “My students were mesmerized by Xeni”, he said, “despite the fact that she was talking about some of the dark aspects of our own mortality, she did it in a way that was typically poetic”.

Sites said Jardin introduced him to the world of blogging during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he was a young CNN correspondent who was not getting much air time. She helped him turn his personal emails to friends and family back home into kevinsites.net, a pioneering but controversial website he started without the permission of his CNN bosses, who later shut it down.

(Click on the video below to watch the full talk.)

Jardin has contributed commentary on digital media and tech culture to Wired, the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times as well as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC and National Public Radio. She is a founding board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and currently hosts and produces episodes of Boing Boing Video.

She is on Twitter at @xeni and blogs at boingboing.net/author/xeni_jardin.

George Brock speaking at the JMSC in the Digital Media Lab.

The future of journalism is good despite the dislocations caused by the Internet, says veteran newspaper editor George Brock.

Journalism is like any other industry and has to adjust to changes in the market and advances in technology, says Brock, Professor and Head of the Department of Journalism at City University London. He is confident the industry will make the adjustment.

“I am entirely optimistic about journalism”, he said.  “It will be fine. The initial worry about the impact the Internet was going to have … it’s not a problem anymore. The issue isn’t whether or not words are going to survive, it’s how they are going to survive, and then how to build and manage the abundance of them the Web is producing”.

Brock, who served as European editor, managing editor and international editor at different times during his 28-year career at The Times of London, spoke at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of The University of Hong Kong last month.

He said the Internet has given new power to a journalist’s words. However, it is important for news outlets to concentrate on the strengths of journalism, such as investigating, verifying, and making sense of information, he said, while adapting them to new mediums like blogs and social media.

He said web sites like Talking Points Memo, which covers American politics, have had to change their approach to conform to on-line reading habits and the limitations of some digital devices. Instead of in-depth articles and front page news stories, Talking Points Memo produces short posts often no more than three paragraphs long to be consumed quickly on the Web and mobile devices.

He said a new business model might be coming into play as the Web matures. The web site Buzzfeed, for example, has built an audience since 2006 by focusing on lightweight content that can be consumed in a matter of seconds, such as jokes and videos of cats. But last year the site began to hire editors with backgrounds in political and investigative reporting, with the idea of expanding the site into long form journalism.

Brock said this model – providing frivolous content first, then adding serious content later – might become a standard for media in the future.

“Journalism has always had to realign itself and readjust and find its feet in a new position”, he said. “That’s been the history of the industry. It is very easy to lose sight of the fact that there have been ups and downs and breakdowns since the beginning. There has never been a long upward golden road for journalism”.

The decline in the circulation of national newspapers over the past ten years indicates the collapse of one business model, but the industry is responding with a replacement, he said. “Decay and reinvention and growth is the story of the journalism”.

Brock is on Twitter at @georgeprof and maintains a blog at georgebrock.net. He is a member of the International Press Institute‘s executive board and a board member of the World Editors Forum.