April 19: Talk – An Overview of Reuters’ Connected China Website

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.