Reenita Malhotra Hora (MJ, 2012) accepts the Gold Radio Trophy for her radio show on RTHK Radio 3.

JMSC alumna Reenita Malhotra Hora has won the Gold Radio Trophy in the current affairs category at the New York Festivals’ International Radio Program Awards.

Hora (MJ, 2012) won the prestigious award for her program, The Girl in the Green Dress, the story behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a 12-year-old Afghan girl screaming over the bodies of her relatives moments after a suicide bombing in Kabul. The photo was shot by photojournalist Massoud Hossaini.

The show presents Hora’s emotional interview with Hossaini, who recounted how he had been knocked to the ground by the explosion but struggled to his feet, injured and bleeding, to continue taking photographs and document the tragedy.

The show aired on November 25, 2012, as an episode of Hora’s weekly Asian Threads radio programme on RTHK Radio 3.

Hora thanked the instructor of JMSC’s Radio News Production Course, Angharad Law, for teaching her how to use the power of radio to tell a story.

“Angharad’s class oriented me into the world of radio philosophically, technically and editorially speaking,” Hora said. “I can honestly say that it taught me everything I knew – up until the point I started at RTHK – about radio and certainly helped me land my job there.”

Chinese censors routinely delete online posts that are deemed by the authorities to be sensitive or subversive. The new application presents these deleted posts in a way that allows journalists and members of the public to browse through and retweet a more complete version of what the Chinese public is saying online. It also permits users to track exactly which posts Chinese censors are deleting, about fifteen minutes after they have been deleted.

“The idea behind the application is that the stories that are being censored on Weibo are the most important stories,” said Henry Williams (MJ, 2013), one of the students who developed the project.

The Twitter feed is the extension of a new web application called WeiboTrends, which was developed earlier this year by Williams and two other students in the JMSC’s first computational journalism class, Tony Yoo (MJ, 2013) and Jacky Wong (MJ, 2013). The three have been attending the Master of Journalism programme at the JMSC for the past year on data journalism scholarships funded by Google.  According to Williams, the application uses deleted Weibo posts provided by the social media project led by JMSC Assistant Professor Fu King-wa.

Sina Weibo is one of many social media websites that have sprung up in China since the government blocked Twitter and Facebook at the beginning of 2009.  Beijing has since continued to try to control the online activity of what is now estimated to be 600 million Internet users. Over half of those use China-based social media services like Sina Weibo, the most popular site, which sees around 100 million messages posted each day.

“We wanted to create a tool for journalists around the world to understand what is happening in China,” Wong said. “But it turned out to be more far-reaching than that. It is also helping to bring more transparency to China itself.”

Williams said that within thirty-six hours after WeiboTrends’ launch, the website received over 10,000 unique visitors. “And sixty percent of our users were from Mainland China. So people in China were going to our site to see what they couldn’t see on Weibo – the deleted posts.”

A day or two after the launch, Williams said, China began censoring WeiboTrends. And within a week, the site had been blocked entirely.

He predicted that the Internet is going to lead to the democratization of China.  ”It’s going to bring all these different people together, which we actually saw in visitors to our site who were from all over China, and not just from east coast urban areas.”

Henry Williams (MJ, 2013) and Joanne Lam (MJ, 2013) created the timeline to illustrate the story that developed when Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and NSA contractor, leaked classified information about US government surveillance programs to The Washington Post and The Guardian.

The timeline follows the story, which first broke on June 7, up to the present time, showing both what is known about Snowden and when it was known: his employment history, his private life, and his movements from selling his house in Hawaii to flying to Hong Kong on May 20.

In addition to Snowden’s biographical information, the timeline includes links to debates the story has sparked in the media, how the US government and the public have reacted to news of the leaks, and the implications of Snowden’s presence in Hong Kong on relations between the United States and China.

The timeline also provides background to give the story context: for example, a link to the USA Today report that the NSA was secretly collecting Americans’ private information in 2006, and then-Senator Barack Obama’s comments on national security when he was running for president in 2007.

“We basically curated a lot of information – including background, major newspaper articles and reports, and other context – into one easy-to-digest story,” Lam said. “With a breaking story with such international significance, there are obviously a lot of stories and opinions out there. A timeline like this helps the audience structure the events clearly, which is harder to do through just text.”

The idea to create an infographic for the story came from AJ Libunao, a JMSC online media producer. Libunao said that when the Snowden story first broke, he thought there might be a way to do something with the information already out there to make it new and interesting enough to pitch to a newspaper.

“A lot of media organizations don’t have much in the way of stories that aren’t text-and-picture-based stories,” Libunao said. “So they are hungry for alternative ways to show information to an audience. Our students are trained in online tools and visual storytelling, and Henry and Joanne came up with something that made it easier for the audience to see what’s been going on without having to sift through a bunch of different stories for information.”

Lam said the JMSC programme taught her to use digital skills in new and creative ways. “Courses at the JMSC taught me to how to present stories more visually, and how to use technology so that stories can be consumed by the audience in an easier way,” Lam said. “I am now confident to produce a story that encompasses more than just text.”

The timeline, which was also picked up by Shanghaiist online news site, will continue to be updated by Wiliams and Lam as the story develops.

Sasa Vucinic, founder of IndieVoices, hosted a Media Entrepreneurial Pitch Session at the JMSC in May.

Three new media project ideas – an online platform about violence against women in Hong Kong and China, a video game to help treat depression in women, and an independent media outlet for Myanmar – received a big boost at the Media Entrepreneurship Pitch Session held recently at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre.

The session, which was designed to encourage and develop digital media and entrepreneurial skills, was held in late May as part of the New.Now.Next Media Conference (N3Con), organized by the JMSC and the Asian-American Journalist Association’s Asian chapter.

“We could have awarded at least two more excellent ideas, but had only three awards,” said Sasa Vucinic, who hosted the pitch session and headed the jury. Vucinic is the founder of IndieVoices, a new crowd-funding platform that raises money to support independent media.

The three winners will receive business and entrepreneurship training, strategic guidance, and mentoring by Vucinic. He will also help the winners prepare their projects for eventual listing on the IndieVoices website, where they will have the opportunity to raise funds for the projects from the public.

Master of Journalism candidates Anjani Trivedi and Olivia Rosenman won recognition for their proposal to create an online multimedia platform, called TableTalk.Asia, to raise public awareness of violence against women in Hong Kong and China – a situation that is underreported in the media, according to the two women.

The project, which also won a Social Inclusion Activities Grant from Hong Kong University in April, aims to encourage public debate about the issue.

“We’re delighted to have received this opportunity to make our [project] viable and hopefully sustainable,” Trivedi said. “This will take us one step closer to our goal of putting the issue of violence against women on the table and have an open and frank conversation about it.”

Another winner was Swe Win, a JMSC alumnus (MJ, 2009) and regular contributor to the New York Times’s “Latitude” blog, who proposed an independent news outlet in his native country of Myanmar.

Swe Win (MJ, 2009), on the right, interviews Muslims made homeless in the aftermath of sectarian violence in western Myanmar last year.

The project includes plans for both an online news website and the publication of a daily newspaper which, he said, is still an essential form of media in Myanmar, where the majority of the population has no access to the internet.

Press freedom has recently been introduced in Myanmar and the newspapers there are still controlled by the families of the military elite, he said. “I want to create a media platform managed by … independent journalists who are eager to tell … the true stories of Myanmar in the highest spirit of journalistic integrity and humanism.”

Swe Win said he was profoundly encouraged by the prize. “Without such support, my idea will remain a mere dream,” he said.

The third winning idea came from Melissa Kronenberg, a graduate student at the Hong Kong campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design. She proposed a video game for women in their sixties and seventies who are suffering from stress, anxiety, or depression. The game, called Agon & Alea, creates virtual companions on mobile devices to help players feel less isolated.

Peter Herford, Professor of Journalism at Shantou University’s School of Journalism and Communication; Frank Proctor, founder of Muse, an English and Chinese-language multimedia publisher; and Dr. Jose Rueda, an entrepreneur and the Professor of Game Development at the Savannah College of Art and Design, joined Vucinic on the jury for the session.

A student reviews her resume with Phoebe Cheung (left), Human Resources Officer for the Asia Pacific at CNN International.

The Journalism and Media Studies Centre hosted a journalism jobs fair last week, and both job-seekers and employers were impressed.

“I was really impressed with the talent and enthusiasm of the students at the job fair,” said Ken Brown, the Wall Street Journal’s Hong Kong bureau chief.

“I met the first Nepalese journalist I have ever met. I met four people that I want to hire. I also met a lot of people I think are too smart for me to hire,” he said.

Sophie Brown, a Master of Journalism candidate from Australia, said the fair helped her understand which skills news organizations are looking for. “I was surprised that so many companies I thought of as being traditionally text-focused, like Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, are looking for multimedia production skills and want people who can do video packages,” she said.

Students line up to meet potential employers at a job fair hosted by AAJA-Asia and the JMSC.

The fair, co-hosted by the Asia chapter of the Asian-American Journalists Association and the JMSC, took place during the third annual New.Now.Next Media Conference (N3Con) at The University of Hong Kong.

The event offered students and alumni – and some 220 conference participants – an opportunity to meet editors, journalists and other representatives from international media companies and public relations firms for professional guidance and career advice.

Participating organizations were the Associated Press, Time, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, CNN International, and Thomson Reuters. Also, Asia Pacific Vision, a media, communications and video production company; NEXTmedia, a Hong Kong-based Chinese language media company; Engadget, a consumer electronics web magazine; and Edelmen, the world’s largest public relations firm.

[Click below to watch the job fair recap video produced by JMSC students.]

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.

The conference will bring together global health professionals, medical doctors, public health officials, and communications experts to discuss how the communication of emergency health risks to the pubic has changed since SARS.

A key focus of the conference will be to look at risk communication at the community level during disease outbreaks and see whether communication can be used as a tool to prevent, or delay, the emergence of new diseases.

Registration is free and open to the public. Register online at jmsc.hku.hk/beyondsars. More information can be found on the conference website.

“On the one hand, the conference aims to look back over the past ten years and see how well the communications lessons that were learned during SARS are being applied,” said Thomas Abraham, the director of the Public Health Communication programme at the JMSC and organizer of the conference. “On the other, we will look broadly at what we can do better: where is there room for improvement and what research is being done, or should be done, to develop better guidelines?”

There will be panels on emerging and recurring diseases, the role of social media in risk communication, communication network capacities in Asia, methods for joining local and global communications, and how to communicate health risks to isolated and insular communities, among other topics.

Guest speakers will include John Rainford, Director of Emergency and Risk Communications for the Canadian Government; Dr. Paul Gully, former Senior Medical Advisor to the Canadian Deputy Minister of Health and former Canadian representative on the Executive Board of the World Health Organization; Malik Peiris, Chair Professor of Microbiology at Hong Kong University; and Melinda Frost, Risk Communication and Emergency Response Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Center for Global Health in Beijing.

The conference will also launch a new online training course, Behavioral Change Communication During Outbreak Response. The course is designed to teach students how to communicate important information to the public during the outbreak of a disease like SARS, when there is no treatment or cure for the disease.

[Click on the video below for an introduction to the course.]

The conference and online course have been developed with funding from the University of Hong Kong’s University Development Fund.

JMSC Director Ying Chan with Filmmaker Nancy Tong after a screening of Tong’s new documentary Trailblazers in Habits.

The Maryknoll Mission sisters, an order established in early 20th century America, have travelled to exotic locations and have often been at the centre of important geopolitical events.

A documentary about the order, Trailblazers in Habits, was screened at Hong Kong University on May 29, and the audience had a chance to talk with the filmmaker, Nancy Tong, who is a visiting professor at the JMSC and was herself educated at the Maryknoll Convent School here in Hong Kong.

Tong said that the sisters’ influence helped her as a teacher, filmmaker and journalist because they taught her how to relate and be compassionate to people from all walks of life.

The film follows the work of the sisters, whose base is in Ossining, New York, as they carried out their mission in segregation-era USA and post-Pearl Harbour internment camps for Japanese, and in foreign postings in Latin America, Africa and China. In Hong Kong, the sisters established the Maryknoll Convent School as well as several other schools and hospitals for Hong Kong’s disadvantaged.

Tong collected a wealth of photographs and historical footage over four and a half years, which illustrate the varied and oftentimes difficult circumstances the women experienced in their work, and she interviewed more than 40 Maryknoll Sisters aged between 75 and 100 years.

The interviews were so touching, said Tong, that she was often moved to tears. The sisters would never take the credit for just how much they had helped people in need, but instead expressed gratitude to those who had welcomed them into their lives and allowed them to do their work. “The sisters were so modest,” she said.

Tong said in response to a question that in her extensive archive of journals, letters and other records she hadn’t found any dark side to the order. But the sisters sometimes clashed with the conservatism of the Catholic Church, she said.

The heritage-listed, art-deco Maryknoll Convent School in Kowloon Tong has educated many influential Hong Kong women, including former Legislative Councillor Tanya Chan and Canto-pop star Gigi Leung.

Stephanie Ip, a Maryknoll alumna who is now a Master of Journalism candidate at HKU, said the documentary gave her a new perspective on the sisters.

“I didn’t realize the Maryknoll sisters did so much for the people, I’ve only known them as my kind and soft-spoken teachers who were occasionally stern with us,” Ip said. “Watching this documentary made me really proud to be a Maryknoll schoolgirl and to have had the honour to be taught by these amazing women.”

The N3Con team - which consisted of JMSC Bachelor of Journalism, Master of Journalism and exchange students – covered the conference in real time, rising to the challenge of reporting, shooting, producing, writing, and broadcasting stories across a range of media for some of the leading journalists in Asia, including bureau chiefs of the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, and Voice of America.

The conference was co-organized by the the Asia chapter of the Asian-American Journalists Association (AAJA) and the JMSC. It took place on May 24, 25 and 26, and brought together media experts, academics, and journalists covering the region. They discussed the year’s biggest stories, the current state of journalism in Asia, and the most recent developments in media and technology.

Panel topics included data journalism, investigative reporting in China, the impact of social media on elections in Asia, the difficulties journalists face covering North Korea, and the recent political and social changes in Myanmar.

Guest speakers included Ellana Lee, Vice President and Managing Editor for CNN International Asia Pacific; Edward Wong, a correspondent at The New York Times’s Beijing bureau; Brian Carovillano, Asia-Pacific News Director for the Associated Press; Jean H. Lee, AP‘s Korea bureau chief; and Steve Herman, bureau chief and correspondent for Voice of America in Seoul.

The N3Con team covered all of it live.

The videos, interviews, photographs, articles, and multimedia reports the students produced allowed people who were not able to attend the conference in person to experience it online through a website set up to cover the event. The coverage also consisted of live blogging and video streaming, taking photographs with Instagram, managing the AAJA-Asia Twitter account, using Storify to organize social media to tell a story; and shooting, editing, and uploading videos to the JMSC Youtube channel.

[View the video recapping the event below.]

Sophie Brown (MJ, 2013), one of the participants on the N3Con coverage team, said that covering so many veteran journalists was a bit intimidating. “You want to make sure that you do a good job, and quote them accurately, because you know that what you write or produce is most likely going to be seen by them.” It’s more pressure than writing for a general audience, she said.

Brown credited the JMSC for providing her with the skills required to report on such a large event.

“It was like literally putting into practice everything I had ever learned in class,” she said. “What was really amazing about it was the quality of work we were able to do in such a short amount of time. It showed me how prepared JMSC graduates are, and how easily they would be able to start their own production company if they wanted to. We worked so well together and everyone had their own strengths and we made a really impressive news site.”

The Bachelor’s of Journalism students on the N3Con coverage team were Vicky Kung (BJ, 2013), James Chan (BJ, 2013), Haruka Nuga (BJ, 2014), Min-Seok Kim (BJ, 2014), and Amy Ha (BJ, 2014). Master’s students were Sophie Brown (MJ, 2013), Joanne Lam (MJ, 2013), Henry Williams (MJ, 2013), Soo-Jin Kim (MJ, 2013), Laura Ma (MJ, 2013), Stephanie Ip (MJ, 2013), Echo Xu (MJ, 2013), Karen Zhang (MJ, 2013), and Josephia Feng (MJ, 2013). Kevin Cureau, an exchange student from France, also participated.

[Click on the video below to meet the N3Con Coverage Team.]

Wendy Tang, Digital Editor at Asia Society Hong Kong Center and AAJA-Asia Chapter Secretary, said that she was impressed by the student’s abilities.

“Any live coverage is not easy because you want to get it up quickly and at the same time accurately,” Tang said. “The students did a great job doing that. And they stayed at the conference late until their work was finished, which is what you have to do in the news business. I am really proud of them.”

This is the third year that AAJA-Asia and the JMSC teamed up to organize a journalism conference in Hong Kong. “We really do owe much of the success of this conference to the … support of the JMSC staff and [students],” said Ramy Inocencio, Asia Business Analyst for CNN International and Vice President of AAJA-Asia.

The JMSC will screen the documentary Trailblazers in Habits on Wednesday, May 29 in Rayson Huang Theatre.

JMSC Visiting Associate Professor Nancy Tong will host a screening of her new documentary Trailblazers in Habits at Hong Kong University’s Rayson Huang Theatre on Wednesday, May 29.

The documentary, which was shown at the Sarasota Film Festival earlier this year, tells the story of the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, an order of American nuns who have been changing the world for over a hundred years.

Founded in 1912, the Maryknoll Sisters have fulfilled their mission “to serve the needs of the people” in a variety of remarkable ways.

They opened the first fully integrated hospital in the United States in Kansas City in 1955. They accompanied Americans of Japanese descent into relocation camps during World War II. And they built schools and houses for hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled to Hong Kong from the Communist Revolution in Mainland China.

The film offers previously unreleased historical footage of Hong Kong, the nuns’ own moving accounts of their experiences, and interviews with some of the people whose lives have been touched by the Maryknoll Sisters’ charity and humanitarian work.

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

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Nancy Tong.

Born in Hong Kong, Tong holds a Bachelor’s degree in Film Production from York University in Canada. She served as Associate Producer and Production Manager for Who Killed Vincent Chin, a film which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1989. She also served as Line Producer for the George Foster Peabody Award-winning documentary Cancer: From Evolution to Revolution.

Tong is currently Visiting Associate Professor at HKU’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. Prior to this, she was commissioned by the Museum of Chinese in America in New York to produce and direct ten short documentaries for its permanent exhibition, and taught media production to Muslim women in China, Pakistan, and Indonesia from 2008 to 2009.

More information about the Maryknoll Sisters may be found on the Trailblazers in Habits website.

Details of the event are below.

Screening: Trailblazers in Habits: Screening and Q&A with Director Nancy Tong

Date: Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Time: 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Venue: Rayson Huang Theatre, Hong Kong University (map)
Speaker: Nancy Tong, Producer and Director, Trailblazers in Habits; JMSC Visiting Associate Professor

This screening is free and open to the public. No registration is required. Enquiries please email jmsccos@hku.hk.