Journalism and rumour busting in China

There has been lots of talk about journalists' role in refuting rumours on Twitter during the recent riots in the UK.

A slightly different take on the same issue has emerged in China with the establishment of a "rumour busting league" by former Xinhua agency journalist Dou Hanzhang.

The Financial Times reports that Mr Dou's league has been trying to expose "rumours" passed on by microbloggers since May.

But his site only attracted significant attention when it began attacking "rumours" surrounding government attempts to cover up details of last month's fatal rail crash.

According to the Southern Metropolis Daily, Mr Dou's league was rather selective in its definition of rumour:

“It targets only rumours that originate with ordinary people and neglects rumours created by the government, and uses official statements as the basis and starting point of its [campaigns]”.

How the BBC challenges censorship in Iran and China

There was an interesting article in The Guardian a few days ago documenting how the BBC is combating censorship in Iran and China using social media (and some good old-fashioned journalism).

At a South by Southwest festival panel, Sanam Dolatshahi, producer and presenter with BBC Persian TV, described an information struggle with the Iranian regime: "they would jam our footage and show their own version of events – using the same UGC, but to tell a different story, a different version of events. They would also try to make us broadcast wrong stuff so that we would lose our credibility."

She suggested that even more emphasis was subsequently placed on "verification and cross-checking of our sources."

Meanwhile, the head of BBC China, Raymond Li, said he uses microblogging websites to publish material. He finds that regulation is less prohibitive on these sites and he can outwit state censors. But he said it required no little skill and plenty of care.

Iran has a history of jamming BBC Persian TV satellites, while China blocks the BBC website every now and then. Like in 1998 or in 2010. 

The aftermath of the China earthquake

When I was preparing a workshop for some journalists at the BBC, I came across a couple of blogs written by husband (Paul) and wife (Lara) in English from Chengdu, China.

I particularly like this post by Lara, who teaches Applied Linguistics at Sichuan University.

In it she describes life one week on from the earthquake: telling her students that this year's class is over, standing outside as sirens ring out in memorial to the dead, noting the pride of the Chinese people in their government and soldiers.

A piece written by Paul a few days ago, which includes pictures of the tents people have been using, also makes interesting reading. He says:

"Class politics is playing itself out here, as parents from poorer areas are asking why their schools were so shoddy that they collapsed, while those from more wealthy schools just down the street survived. After days of protests, a group of parents planned a march to Chengdu to demand answers. At first, a local Communist Party official pled with them, from his knees no less, not to march to the capital. They also offered the parents $4,500 per child if they would just keep quiet. Finally, they corralled the protesting parents onto a bus and drove them to a meeting with local Party officials, hoping to avoid the embarrassment of going over local officials’ heads."

Links for today: China and Searching the Web

More reaction on Twitter, Blogging and the China Earthquake

• Death toll rises alarmingly.
  
• Twitter backlash begins - it was useful but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
• The Times reports that Chinese bloggers reckon somebody should have known this earthquake was going to happen. After all, when over a million butterflies migrate (who counted them?), frogs show up on the streets of Mianyang and 80,000 tonnes of water disappear from a (surprisingly large) 'pond', that clearly says 'earthquake imminent'.
  

Searching the Web - moving towards quality not quantity

• Not content with inventing the World Wide Web (honestly, I'd have sat back and decided that sort of achievement was not likely to beaten), Sir Tim Berners-Lee and some of his friends have been given some money for a Transparent Journalism project. They're attempting to develop a way to 'source tag' news articles, which would be included in online searches. So, for example, you could filter out all news articles that weren't based on eyewitness accounts.

• While we're on this theme, try checking out hakia.com. It's a search engine that attempts to search the web semantically.
  

Twitter and the earthquake in China

Much excitement among new media types this morning at the ability of Twitter to provide up-to-the-minute information on the Chinese earthquake.

Earlier in the day, Rory-Cellan Jones, technology correspondent at the BBC, described twitter as an 'amazing way of tracking Chinese quake news'. In fact, he thought his discovery that the tool was not merely a 'fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives' was worth a quick blog post.

Paul Bradshaw has an excellent summary post on how Twitter can be used for newsgathering with links to various other places. He suggests that this sort of crowdsourcing is far superior to some of the more traditional methods of journalism:

'How quickly would a journalist have found someone who speaks English and was affected by the quake? Or an image? '

If you really want to take advantage of this resource you'll also need:

• Tweestscan, allowing you to search 'tweets' for key words like 'earthquake'

• Twitterlocal, enabling you to track down tweets from China, (especially useful with a dose of Google translation)

• Tweetburner, which means you can track what other tweeters are linking to. (Alpha Twitter does a similar job.)
  

By all accounts, following self-confessed 'tech geek blogger', Robert Scoble, on Twitter also helps.

Best of the BBC Blog Network

Here are my picks from the BBC Blog Network over the last few weeks:

1. Robin Lustig reckons that no news from Iraq is not necessarily good news. His piece includes extracts from an email he received about the daily life of an Iraqi medical student.

2. World Have Your Say publish several letters from Baghdad reflecting on 5 years of conflict.

3. (a) The Editors blog about BBC World going off air in China.
(b) A week later the BBC's dot.life blog reports that the BBC news website is being unblocked.
(c) Jon Williams, World News Editor, sums up the situation.

4. iPM links to a video blogging surgeon serving with the US Army in Iraq.

5. Internet Blog on social networking guidelines for staff.

6. Newsnight uses blogs to find out what's happening in Zimbabwe.

7. World Have Your Say presenter Ros Atkins tries to square the BBC's commitment to impartiality with Jeff Jarvis's call for more openness and honesty. This is something I've blogged about previously.

Silencing dissent in Tibet

Chinese authorities have taken online action in an effort to suppress the protests against Chinese rule in Tibet according to United Press International. Chinese authorities blocked access to YouTube and other sites, stopping web-users from seeing video footage of the demonstrations.

No such videos have appeared on the China-based, video sharing site youku.com. (Afraid my Chinese isn't good enough to verify this).

Chinese 'citizen journalist' killed

A Chinese man who tried to film a protest on his mobile phone was killed by a city official on Monday.

Wei Wenhua, 41, was beaten to death as he filmed a confrontation between officials and villagers in the province of Hubei.

The villagers were complaining about waste being dumped near their homes.

The killing has caused outrage in China's online community and Qi Zhengjun, chief of the administration bureau at Tianmen has already lost his job over the incident. For more see CNN and Global Voices.