Directing the work of unpaid amateurs might not work in the US, but it’s progressing quite well on its own here. Though, what China lacks in a free media it makes up for—in a steadily growing number of areas—is pervasive internet access and smartphones not tied to any particular telecom carrier, among other things, the most of which is its nearly 200 million internet users. Major stories are broken by China’s army of forward-thinking bloggers on a steady basis, they just don’t often make it into English. Two that have received some foreign but limited or no domestic coverage of late are the collapse of the massive ponzo scheme in northern China’s Shenyang and the campaign against building a huge toxic chemical factory in the Xiamen in the south, carried out mostly online, and driven by bloggers, namely Lian Yue, but which has definitely been a group effort and seen the issue analyzed from every scientific angle possible, with each blogger contributing their own particular expertise.

Those two are community/direct interest stories, that’s true. But I wish you could see just how much time and effort that tens of thousands of Chinese bloggers spend each night (out of work journalists or chemistry specialists blogging during the day, no doubt) analyzing political stories, solving murder cases, exposing politicians’ lies and fulfilling a whole series of other media roles that Chinese journalists don’t have the time or space or capacity to even come close to. If I could recommend one blog where you can follow all this, it would be EastSouthWestNorth, if you can handle the rate at which he translates these things.

With the group brain that China’s blogsphere quickly became in 2007, with all the non-amateurs who dedicate so much time to it, I look forward to 2008 with complete enthusiasm. And with everything that’s done for free on the Chinese blogsphere, I’m not convinced at all that a functioning business model is the key to solving this problem, at least in China. How does that help Americans? You should see how much time gets devoted to dissecting/adding to US news stories.

I’m not sure how the original sounded, but the translation is a very powerful statement. I wish more journalists writing in the “objective” style would understand this point.
I think it’s do-or-desist at this point. For every “quote” a writer warps to fit their own angle, there’s going to be another another blog post sent out to defend it. The same way millions of bloggers working together break stories faster than any NYTimes reporter or AP story stringer could; so in this case, why not start thinking about how to better utilize these networks.

So I definitely think now that the bar has been partially raised, the onus is on traditional media to pick up the other end and embrace the quality, foster it, even, that the blogsphere offers.

Back to your point, I really like the way Zuola puts it, that words like objectivity and balance don’t mean much if the end result sees non-truths being represented and not challenged. To pull some Naomi Klein or Glenn Greenwald in on this, how different is corporate journalism from ideological propaganda anyway?

Zoula’s main criticism of bloggers such as Zhai Minglei and Tiger Temple seems to be that “nobody can speak on behalf of other people without their permission”. But Zoula seems to have forgotten this when he wrote his blog post.

I wonder whether it ever occured to him that (due to his very young age?) the “statistical process through which [he forms his] view of the world” is necessarily much more simplistic than what experienced bloggers/ journalists do to reach an informed opinion.

Maybe I’m simply too demanding to settle for a toned-down “entertainment style approach” that Zoula represents?

Besides, what is Zoula’s reason for talking so negatively about his former teachers anyway? Appeasing the government by demarkating a clear line that he will not cross? Creating a following among more nationalistic voices in China that may endorse some of his simplifications?

“[...] the best investigative reporting of new journalism tends to rest on too narrow an ideological base — the rational, ironic, fact-oriented world of the media liberal. So we have a situation, call it a cultural malady, of the most basic sort: a failure of sufficient information (that is, good literary information) to put into those centers of our mind we use for assessment. [...] The men who do the real work offer us no real writing, and the writers who explore the minds of such men approach from an intellectual stance that distorts their vision. [...] All too many saints, monsters, maniacs, mystics, and rock performers are being written about these days, however, by practitioners of journalism whose inner vision is usually graphed by routine parameters. Our continuing inability to comprehend the world is likely to continue.”

I could not agree more.

“When writers use dialectic to try and represent everyone and turn everything into air-tight logic, readers’ enthusiasm for participation and interaction gets lost.”

I’m not sure how the original sounded, but the translation is a very powerful statement. I wish more journalists writing in the “objective” style would understand this point.