Who Are Doing Reporter's Job? Comedians!

How sad is it to have a comedian represent the free and independent media while the real journalist, Jim Cramer, looks like a joke with his sleeves rolled up and defending himself about the CEOs he interviewed: "We were friends! I trusted them!" Ugh, really? I thought I was half a globe away from China. Shhh, let's watch the video. It speaks louder than any words.

Cover it Live

I'd like to predict, the emerging of something like Cover-it-Live, a website enables live reporting of events, would simply subvert traditional news reporting and writing. Because if we can report news sentence-by-sentence as it goes, why bother take extra hours to write it in "the inverted pyramid".

CoveritLive, a Toronto-based start-up founded in late 2007, says on its website that its users has been using it cover "millions of occasions from niche events like chess tournaments in Germany or local elections in London, to marquee events like the NFL draft and American Idol."

That is not to say journalists are becoming bookkeepers, a job that meticulously records numbers, in this case, facts (my least favorite job in the world). But journalists might want to consider one thing. There is obviously no advantage to compete speed with people reporting from CoveritLive, so where's the edge? Using an analogy from the finance industry, data recording and analysis are two different jobs. Let it be it in journalism, too. Let the CoveritLive reporters collect the facts. Journalists take the facts and ANALYZE them. Time to toss "objectivity" out of the window.

The Wiki Talk --- The Wikipedia Revolution

I thought I knew Wikipedia pretty well until last night after I attended my friend Andrew Lih's (left in the picture) book launch at Columbia's School of Journalism.

Lih started off by an astonishing statement that when he first encountered Wikipedia, he thought it was "sheer lunacy." "Why would anyone trust or even go to the site?" Lih wondered. After checking out the website, he was suprised to find "the articles on the site were actually pretty good!"

Wikipedia is a good example that: a concept that works in practice but doen't work in theory. This is what Lih's book: The Wikipedia Revolution is based on. Today, Wikipedia is one of the top 10 most visited websites around the world.

If you think you knew Wikipedia quite well as I did, try to answer a few questions.

Do you know where did the name Wiki come from (hint: it has little to do with the fruit Kiwi)? How did Wikipedia come into being? Who are the Wikipedians and who are the vandalists? How do Wikipedians from different countries consent on spelling rules? And do you even know Wikipedia has a main page?

The name Wiki came from "Wiki Wiki" bus, a quick bus that takes people in between terminals in the airport of Hawaii. The idea of the Wiki software is it is a quick way to edit content on the Internet.

Wikipedia was started as an idea of a conventional encyclopedia that the content is to be free. The original name was Nupedia.com. The website hired a bunch of PhDs in various fields but only produced 12 articles after the first year. When the website adopted the Wiki software, which allows everyone to edit any page at any time, within a several months, they produced hundreds of articles, ten times as they used to produce in a year.

Many vandalists are traced back to high school servers during the time from 9am to 5pm. Most of the vandalists are high school students who are bored in class.

As to the spellings, British and American wikipedians argue through the years. The final concensus is if the topic is British-related, it would be "colour"; if American-related, "color".

Andrew Lih is inviting the readers to keep writing the last chapter of the book. You can write and edit at: www.wikipediarevolution.com/wiki.

The full live report on the presentation and Lih's Q&A can be found here.

The Daily Beast: Online Syndication is Butter

Launched 5 months ago today, The Daily Beast, a new kid on the Web, is getting a lot of attention: 2 million unique visitors a month. The master heads are hoping the buzz would, some day, turn into bucks.

But not now. For the time being, the Daily Beast doesn't need to worry about "food hunting." With $18 million funding from New York media mogul Barry Diller (left in the photo), the 24 Daily Beast staff, led by Tina Brown (right in the photo), is on a free ride to hunt for content. The goal is to keep driving up the traffic.

As Brown said in a recent interview: "I think news is the best marketing budget. I'd rather have news than a marketing budget. If you have stories people want to read, that's the best way to market your site. It's much better than pictures, posters, and expensive advertising."

And Ms. Brown is in a perfect position to do so. Former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, talk show host and author of book Diana, Princess of Wales, Tina Brown, 54, has done it all in journalism. It's hard not to have A-list writers flocking on her site.

Tina's long-time friend, Chris Buckley's column, started at the Daily Beast's launch, has been a huge traffic driver. It's been picked up everywhere.It's one of the great fun things about the traffic metrics to be able to see. It's still driving months after it was published. “We published the piece whenever it was, and now I can see people are going back to the new piece about having left the National Review, but they're also then going to the other piece to see what he said in the first place. So it's been great for us.”

Edward Felsenthal, a veteran at the Wall Street Journal, left earlier this year to join the Daily Beast as its executive editor, said the website also serves as a semi-refuge for traditional print and book writers --- an easy way to publish on the Web. "We receive phone calls from well-known writers saying 'I just wrote a piece, but I don't have a computer. I have to fax it to you.'"

The Daily Beast is in line with Drudge and the Huffington Post, but it is "not trying to be any of them." "We don't want to be another aggregator," Felsenthal said. The content goes through the editors with twists. "It sifts, sorts and curates. We accept and we reject."

The website pays a fee to its contributors and demands a fee from other websites that link to its content.

"I think online syndication is a great idea," Felsenthal said. The website is already making modest money from it. "Syndication is not bread-and-butter yet, but, butter."

Stay tuned and stay toned...

89-Year-Old Journalist Signed Onto Facebook

I met Roy Rowan, a 89-year-old Time-Life journalist, at a Reuters event two weeks ago. We set up to meet a week later for an interview so that he can tell me all about the telegraph age of reporting. However, at the end of the day, Rowan signed up for Facebook and joined the latest trend in media.

Another week later, Rowan has reconnected with over 30 friends on the social network, including a former employee he hired nearly 30 years ago. Rowan put up a link http://www.royrowan.com and a fishing photo on the page. One of his Facebook pal calls him "the handsome devil". Within days, he is full-blown on Facebook. But only a week before, it was the same man who told me: "I only write on my computer. I don't download much and I don't enjoy reading online."

You really couldn't blame the old man. When Rowan started his writing career in Shanghai back in 1947 upon bumping into then Time-Life China bureau chief at a jazz bar in Peace Hotel, telegraph was the predominant technology for transmitting stories across the ocean. It took an average two weeks to ship photo negatives back to New York's Time-Life building.

For the next decades, Rowan has remained on the front line of journalism writing about the battles of China's civil war, the Cold War in Europe, and President Ford's (right in the photo) military action to secure release of the Mayaguez, the American cargo ship in 1975.

Until our conversation entered the Internet age, Rowan paused and asked me: "So tell me what you've got out of Facebook?" It didn't take me long to explain what Facebook was and how it works.

"So you are saying Facebook is even quicker to reach out to people than websites?" Rowan asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Then I should sign up." Just like that, Rowan joined the Internet community. To me, the greater joy came from the realization of a fact that it lies in every journalist's heart the desire to keep up with the latest and stay open-minded.

Rowan, "a handsome devil", who is younger than him at heart?

Photo Courtesy of Roy Rowan

The Problem Is Not The News

Yesterday, the respected editorial writer for the Arizona Republic, Doug MacEachern, harangued a blogger for taking pleasure in writing about the demise of newspapers.

"That is the irony of the loss of the Rocky Mountain News. There is no diminished demand for its product. For its paper product, yes. And for its advertising space. But not for its genuine product, the news. The 'Rocky' earned four Pulitzers in the last decade. Its problem was not its news."

No, the problem is not its news. The problem is not to confuse news with information. To me, news means information that is investigated, verified and delivered in a timely manner with precise writing. Therefore, blogs do not provide news. This blog, for example, offers information and personal opinion, but not news.

Information and news are two different animals. Imagine the different amount of work goes into the news and blog posts. Anybody can write a blog post in thirty minutes while all the news pieces require fact checking, editing, writing and rewriting. That’s a difference between McDonald’s and six-course French dinner. If blogs could ever replace newspaper and magazines, it would have happened within the past few hundred years since the first English-language newspaper appeared in Amsterdam in 1620.

If curiosity as a human nature triggered the very existence and prosperity of news, then suspicion is another human nature that keeps gossip and incredible information away from trustworthy news.

If there is a problem with news today, it is that we need it more than any other time in human history. By that, I don't refer to information. Ask yourself a question as a reader: how much do you trust the information you read on a blog. We all need trustworthy news, particularly in an information-overloading time like this.

So I would like to echo what Mr. MacEachern had to say that the problem is not its news. And I also empathize his sentiment for getting a little defensive as an old-fashioned journalist over the topic of the demise of the print. But seriously, reminiscing as much as you like, but the truth is even if we devour McDonald’s day and night, what we really crave for is the French feast.