Here are the slides I used in the two lectures on social media and journalism (and this PDF file is the semester review slides).

You can download the Final Exam (Word document) now. To complete the exam paper, you will also need to read this article (password protected (jmsc) PDF) from the New York Times and watch the news video below. We will go over the exam questions together in this week’s class.

For the first evaluation form, please complete this one page survey by May 5 [May 12]. I will tell you the password in class.

Fort the second one, here’s is the message I got from the university. Please complete this before May 12.

“Please go to the weblink http://setl.hku.hk where you should see a list of all forms that you need to complete. Please note that your evaluation will be saved anonymously, without any identification. There are separate forms for the course, teacher (and if appropriate) tutor and demonstrator. There are instructions, an FAQ link and a link for you to report any missing courses at the weblink.”

I really appreciate your feedback. Thanks.

- Story interest (5 points)
I’ve looked into how important or interesting the story is to the public and what your angles (focuses) are. In other words, I’ve evaluated how much you understood about “what makes news.”

- Quality of research and background information (5 points)
In this criterion I’ve paid particular attention to the information that you’ve included and not included in the story. To put it in another way, I wanted to see how much context you have given to the story and whether or not the public is given a bigger picture.

- Appropriateness of quotes and sources (5 points)
Both the sources quoted in your story and the sources that should have been quoted or consulted are taken into consideration here. When we say “sources” we are not just talking about the people you can talk to but also the sources of information such as government records, academic papers and news media.

- Attribution and accuracy (5 points)
I have looked for some evidence that suggest you’ve gone through the process of verification appropriately, which should be clear and transparent in your writing.

- Story structure, grammar, spelling, punctuation (5 points)
Your language, tone, style and other elements that determine the overall impression of your story are examined in this criterion.

General feedback:

I am not sure why, but many of you did not write the story to make it read like a proper journalistic profile piece that you normally see in newspapers and news magazines. There are a number of stories that read like an entry for your personal diaries or an article in a travel guidebook. Worse, some of them read like a pure advertorial.

With that said, I can also see that most of you tried to incorporate the concepts we discussed in the lectures and tutorials by making sure to include the information about the sources and be transparent about your process of verification.

But all in all, most of you needed more background research.

You cannot talk about how “good” or “bad” business has been, for example, just by talking to a shop owner and some customers because it doesn’t mean anything unless the readers are also presented with something to compare. A shop can be doing great if many other shops in the same industry have made less money than the shop in question — then it would be interesting to see what this particular shop did differently (and that’s a news angle right there).

Likewise, you cannot say this shop or person is “the only” one in HK offering this service or doing certain thing if the source of information is the owner of the shop or the person himself/herself and people closely related to the shop/person. You must make sure what your sources said is really true by digging some documents or talking to at least a few other “independent” people who know about the subject matter very well.

Details are one of the elements that make journalism a public service. You cannot just say “rent” is going up. You have to tell exactly how much (in the last one month, three months, one year, etc). You cannot just say this person has won this award without explaining what it means. You have to tell how significant that award is by giving details (such as the number of contestants, winner’s prospect in the industry with that award, etc). You cannot just say this restaurant is “popular.” You must tell how many customers a day, how many dishes they serve, and so on and so forth in comparison with other restaurants nearby or those who serve similar cuisine in the area.

Some stories read like an advertorial because almost all information came from one or two sources who are closely related to the shop or a person (and thus it mainly talks about how “special” the shop is or the person is with lots of praises without objective facts that could back up such claims).

Another thing that bothered me a lot is the adjectives and adverbs in your writing that clearly colored your coverage — most of the time they were there to give very positive impressions on the subject matter, or worse, to express writers’ (your) personal views. Words such as “surprisingly,” “happily,” “interestingly,” and other expressions similar to those (“to our surprise,” etc) do not normally have a space in journalism (How do you know that it is surprising to the audience, too? How can you be certain that a person was “happily” doing this and that, if it was not you? Why are you sure that the public finds it “interesting” as well?).

• Saigon execution photo and Eddie Adams interview (Newseum)
• Photo Tampering throughout History (Four and Six)
• Photojournalism Behind the Scenes (Ruben Salvadori) embedded below:

Here are the lecture slides I used today. let me know if you have any question.

And the following photo is for the discussion in next week’s tutorial. Jean will give you the background information in class.

Courtesy: Mr. Stanley Forman’s official website

In the tutorial we will discuss the “fire escape collapse” photos taken by Stanley Forman (above). Please take a look at the series of photos on Forman’s website before you come to the class.

In the next tutorial, we will use this Deconstruction Workbook (password: jmsc) to analyze news stories. Please download, read and bring it to the class. We will also discuss your presentation grouping. Please read through the details and decide which topic you want to research.

Courtesy: Rose Tang.

And the following is the exercise you will do in the tutorial next week:

• The photo on the right is going viral on Facebook right now. It is purported to be a picture of a restaurant named “Beijing Snacks” or “百年卤煮” near Prince Gong’s Mansions (恭王府) at Houhai Lake, a popular tourist spot just to the north of the Forbidden City.
• In English, the poster says that the restaurant “does not welcome the Japanese, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese and dogs.”
• You are a reporter. Your editor says this could potentially be a great story and asked you to look into it.
• What do you do first? How do you verify that the photo is authentic? Where do you go? Who do you talk to? What sort of information do you gather to write a news story out of this?

Lastly, please also go through the instruction for Profile story assignment before you come to the tutorial.

As promised in the lecture, this document (password: jmsc) contains two articles from the Standard and the South China Morning Post on Wang Guangya’s comment on Article 23.

You need to read both articles and discus in the tutorial:

1. where the difference comes from
2. what should have been done 

And here’s the case study you need to discuss in tutorial as well:

Event: Open Day carnival at Sha Tin racecourse (3 October 2004)
Details: It was meant to be a family event to celebrate the National Day. Children under 18 were allowed to be in the racecourse and walk around the area except near the betting windows.

Your reporter who went there says there were games stalls and performances. Financial Secretary Henry Tang was also there with his children and relatives.

Jockey Club says the event attracted about 48,000 adults and more than 7,000 children; and the Executive Director said the event was a great success.

Anti-gambling groups, on the other hand, criticized the event, saying that it encouraged gambling among minors.

Gambling Watch spokesman said children could ask the adults to make a bet. Jockey Club said no one under 18 could bet. Home Affairs Secretary Patrick Ho defended the Club.

Your tutorial group as a whole needs to:

1. decide which photo to put on the front page
2. write a headline for the article

• You be the editor (exercise sheet for the second tutorial session)
• Lecture Slides 03

• Lecture Slides 01: Introduction. What do we learn in this course and why is it important?
• Lecture Slides 02: What makes journalism different from other kinds of information?
• Taxonomy Grid (Information Neighborhood)
• Taxonomy and VIA

Our tutorial session will start next week and it will be in Room 102 on the first floor of Eliot Hall (Building number 6 on this map of HKU).

On this website we will post all course-related materials including news articles, academic papers and videos that will be discussed in the lectures and tutorials. As such, all students of this class will be expected to check this website frequently, which can be done either by subscribing to the RSS feed or by signing up for email alerts.

This course is open for all HKU students, not just journalism major and minor students. In fact, the basic concepts that will be covered this semester are mainly for news audience.

We will try to build your understanding of the importance of news and reliable information as a news consumer, while discussing the basic principles that underpin journalism.

We will then explore the different types of news reporting from old-fashioned print journalism to the brave and exciting new world of social media, paying particular attention to the economic, social and cultural challenges created by the shift from traditional publication channels to new media.

This is not a journalism skills course, but you will be introduced to basic reporting and writing techniques.

Now a little bit about myself. My name is Masato Kajimoto. I came to Hong Kong in 2001 and worked as an online reporter and ‘specials editor’ (a sort of like a web producer) at CNN before taking up a career in teaching and research. Although I was working for a U.S. news media outlet, I am Japanese. I was born and raised in Nagoya, Japan, and I have written news articles, features and columns both in English and Japanese.

My specialized area in journalism is web/online journalism. I was one of the early birds to get a master’s degree in broadcast and “new media” journalism back in 2000 at the University of Missouri-Columbia. And ever since then I have been very excited and passionate about the new forms of news presentations and narratives we find on the internet.In this course I would like to first focus on the fundamental ideas behind the press and delve into the functions of news media and journalism in our society today. Throughout the course, I would like to share with you my thoughts and ideas about what it means to be a member of the fourth estate (for those of you who aspire to be journalists in the future) and a smart media consumer (for the rest of you) while helping you to develop your own understanding of what journalism really is.

The Teaching Assistant for this course is Jean Hyun. Jean recently arrived in Hong Kong; she is joining us having just completed her graduate studies at Harvard University this past spring. Jean has an academic background in history and a strong interest in North Korean education. At Harvard, she served as an editor of the Harvard Asia Quarterly, a graduate student-run journal on contemporary Asian affairs. Jean will be running the tutorials for this course.

Our intention is to challenge you intellectually in every class, but the course will only be as good as you make it through your active participation in the tutorials and lectures.

Our goal is to help you become the sort of informed, engaged participants in the Information Age who will help shape the 21^st century. And we hope you’ll have some fun along the way.

Welcome and let’s have some intellectual fun together.