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.”

Barry Kalb

Instructor: Barry Kalb

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

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

Please register here.

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.