This is the media; but not as we know it

When a dust storm swept across Sydney in September last year - causing residents to fear the battle of Armageddon was upon us - the first picture I saw came via a tweet from the microblogging website Twitter. In fact, I had downloaded dozens of photos and had a good understanding of the phenomenon pushing through much of New South Wales before the major news sites put up their first images of the day.

Following the Iran election in June the same year, it was the residents who reported much of the fallout on social media sites when the foreign press had heavy restrictions placed on it.

Of course it was the newspapers that most of us looked to when we wanted the news of the events all wrapped up in concise, well-researched articles with the broader facts, expert commentary and personal accounts. But no-one could deny that the media industry was rapidly changing and that there was certainly a place for citizen journalism.

China's netizens

Curled up on my couch last night with a copy of Katrina Beikoff's travel memoir, No Chopsticks Required, I was again reminded of how much the media industry is evolving.

Katrina, a Walkley award-winning Australian journalist, moved with her family to Shanghai in 2008 to work as a 'foreign expert' for The Shanghai Daily. In her book, she talks in depth about the 'netizen' phenomenon and explains that some of the best news coverage of the deadly Sichuan earthquake in May 2008 (which killed more than 68,000 people) came from netizens.

I wanted to share this extract from Katrina's book which gives an insight into just how valuable this new element of newsgathering can be.

In China, members of the Internet community are known as netizens. I was told by work colleagues that China’s Internet population was 298 million and the country had about 50 million bloggers.

On the newspaper I had handled many stories quoting netizens and initially wondered why often anonymous Internet bloggers were having their comments taken so seriously as to warrant being quoted in the news pages of a metropolitan daily. I began to realise that the comments were not just by the odd Internet user, but a whole tide of netizens.

This army of faceless newsbreaking bloggers and Internet users were making real contributions to the information available to everyday Chinese citizens and it just couldn’t be ignored. In the face of heavily controlled media, netizens were becoming China’s taskforce for transparency of government, providing real opinions and rallying action.

I know it sounds terrible, but it was a disaster of the magnitude of the Sichuan earthquake that allowed the netizen phenomenon to really shine. From the perspective of a media observer in China, I found it exciting.

As the earthquake struck Sichuan, not only did China’s netizens unite to find missing people such as the soldier’s wife, they dominated mainstream reporting of the tragedy. Netizens became pivotal in getting genuine information and pictures of the quake zone out nationally and internationally, well before conventional media. The first stories and pictures of the disaster appeared on Internet websites about 20minutes after the first rumblings of the massive quake.

Within four hours of the earthquake, there were over 30 million searches on the Wenchuan earthquake in China’s main search engines. The vice-president of Xinhua News Agency and president of its online arm Xinhuanet, Zhou Xisheng, said he had never experienced anything like it….

The effect on China’s traditional media was astounding. Many media commentators said official print and television news reporting of the quake was deeper and broader than any event in Chinese history. It had to be. Official media was no longer in control of the story.

At the Shanghai Daily we saw the paper forced to report the human stories, many often translated straight from the netizen reportage. As a newspaper reader accustomed to detail rather than broadbrush statistics and rawness of emotion rather than rhetoric, I found the netizen influence vital in making the paper’s coverage of the earthquake worth bothering with.

In No Chopsticks Required, Katrina not only gives an insight into China's media, she affords readers a personal account of life in China and the trials and tribulations of immersing one's young family into a foreign land.

In January I will talk to Katrina to learn more of the researching and writing techniques she considers vital in creating an informative and engaging, yet humorous and personal, memoir. Look out for this post on 7 January 2011.

No Chopsticks Required
My family's unexpected year in Shanghai
By Katrina Beikoff
Published by Finch Publishing
January 2011

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