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.

JMSC hosted an introductory workshop on News Literacy in December 2012.

Become a News Literacy Fellow this summer at the University of Hong Kong!

Help pioneer a new course for university students on how to evaluate information coming from the news media!

Work and study with a group of journalists and faculty at Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC), the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and The Center for News Literacy, Stony Brook University.

The one-week immersion course will include a condensed version of News Literacy program developed by Stony Brook University, which has been modified to meet the media ecology in Asia in collaboration with JMSC.

- Your students blog, Tweet, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Weibo… but do your students know how to find reliable information?

We’re looking for university educators in Asia who teach critical thinking to the first generation that lives out loud on social media.

- How will you integrate the news into your lessons next fall?

By joining us August 4-10 at HKU to learn fresh curricula that uses ripped-from-the-headlines examples to teach timeless critical thinking skills.

News Literacy program has been helping educators build critical thinking and citizenship lessons in the United States for the last five summers in intensive and practical workshops. Now we would like to replicate its success in Asia.

- Do your students look for evidence or settle for assertion and rumor?

They don’t settle for assertion and rumor if they learn News Literacy. Two recent studies found that News Literacy students reliably spot imbalanced, undersourced reporting.

Join us for a week of thinking and learning about how your students can sift through the information tsunami to find the facts instead of falling for retweets of junk information, like the “news report” that North Korea delayed the missile test due to a glitch in Windows 8.

- I am interested. How do I apply? How much does it cost?

Seats are limited. The workshop is free and we will be providing room and some meals (breakfast, lunch and a few dinners), but not airfare.

Please contact JMSC for more information (Jean Hyun: jyhyun@hku.hk), or use the online form below to apply.

The application deadline is June 23, 2013.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.