Hope and fear, the world of Murielle

A Chilean girl dreamt of becoming a poet grew up as a journalist who went undercover to reveal a gang of pimps in Concepcion, the second largest city in Chili. She almost got herself raped. “I try to keep fears to myself; I won’t do things like this again,” said Murielle Gonzalez Oisel.

After 8 years as a Chilean magazine journalist, Murielle is now studying in London for a master degree of Journalism. She is proud of herself having the guts to come to a foreign country where everything is new to her.

“My biggest fear is failing the course and not getting my diploma,” she said. But the same woman has the courage to fight against crimes.

A fearless warrior

In 2007, Murielle worked on a story about a pimp gang recruiting countryside girls to work as prostitutes in Concepcion. She went undercover for three weeks and successfully published her investigation in NOS magazine she worked for.

“I got myself into trouble, and the situation was so dangerous,” the fear at that very moment seemed to strike her again before she continued, “I won’t do things like this unless there are more protection measures.”

Despite the great courage she demonstrated in work, Murielle said she didn’t like challenges in general.

A strong woman

She was a distinguished student and everything worked fine for her, but she somehow got lost after she left college and started her career.

“I used to live in a bubble when I was a student, but the real world is quite different,” Murielle said, “I made many stupid mistakes, and I was afraid sometimes.”

She is not the kind of person who talks to people about her problems. “I put fears inside myself, and I want to be strong outside, now matter how fearful I am,” said Murielle.

Hope and fear

But she used to have somebody to talk to.

“When I was afraid, I used to talk to my mom, but she died in 2001,” she looked up for a moment to keep tears from dropping.

“Now I can talk to my boyfriend. He is willing to do everything for me, even giving up his well-paid job in London and move to Chili with me, if I can’t find a job here after graduation,” Murielle smiled.

Hope and fear. This is the world in Murielle’s eyes. This is also why she likes this verse in Whiteman’s poem: “Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done.”

Gordon Brown is playing tough

British prime minister Gordon Brown put forward his Afghanistan strategies during the Commonwealth summit on 28 November. Afghanistan president Karzai now faces bigger pressure from international communities, particularly, from the US and UK who contribute the most troops in the country.

Mr. Brown’s statements were made in an imperative tone, a rare phenomenon among world leaders.

Within three months, our benchmark is that the Afghan government should have identified additional troops to send to Helmand province for training.

Within nine months, President Karzai should have completed the process of appointing 400 provincial and district governors.

Some 5,000 additional Afghan troops should be sent to Helmand province to be trained by British forces stationed there.

…

A shameful president

Despite sitting in the No. 1 chair in Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai is not treated as head of a country. Brown speaks to him as a father sets rules for his child.

Karzai made so much efforts, even cheating in elections, to ensure himself a second term as Afghanistan president. He should be humiliated for neither pooling enough domestic support nor winning respect from his overseas counterparts.

Strong Brown

Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is pretentiously playing tough to gain points for himself and his Labour party.

The ongoing Iraq inquiry again stirred up the noiseness that UK is a poodle of US. This might cause Labour party’s support ratio to decrease. Brown needs to demonstrate himself not another poodle of the US like his predecessor Tony Blair.

This is proved again on 29 November when he told BBC that Pakistan must do more to “break” al-Qaeda and find Osama Bin Laden.

“If we are putting our strategy into place, Pakistan has to show that it can take on al-Qaeda.”

Sociology of news for semester 2 and online magazine for final project

Two days later, it will be deadline for selection of modules in semester 2 and final project.

So far, I have only decided one module, Online Jounalism. I’m thinking about replacing my other choice of Politicial Communication with Sociology of News.

As for the final project, I prefer working on an online magazine or writting a dissertation, because both allow me to control my own schedule.

Radio final project and TV final project might be interesting as well, but I’ll have to follow others’ steps, e.g. the interviewees or the person I’ll be filming.  

Rewrite: Southern Weekly’s interview with US president

Southern Weekly did an exclusive interview with US president Barack Obama during his visit in China last week.

The newspaper editor-in-chief and one of its senior journalists conducted the interview and the 6 questions they asked are:

• Favorite part about visiting China
• Whether have spare time to play basketball
• China-America cooperation in Asia-pacific region
• Timetable to acknowledge China’s market economic status
• US restrictions on high-tech export to China
• Policy on not restraining China’s rise

Sensitive issues such as China’s human rights, freedom of speech, internet blockage, etc. were not raised, or at least, not published.

According to Xing Lieshan, one of the newspaper’s senior editors, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China was angry about the interview and instructed that no other media or websites should republish the interview.

One reason is that the department was not informed before the interview, the other reason is that the department was not happy about certain issues talked about in the interview.

Mr. Xing explained that interviews with visiting leaders were usually conducted by Xinhua News Agency or CCTV (China Central TV), the two most loyal mouthpieces of the Communist Party, but this time, Mr. Obama handpicked Southern Weekly, probably because of its reputation for speaking for the people and exposing government scandals.

He said the Publicity Dept. is an organization of the Party, and it’s inappropriate for the US side to raise interview request with them; instead, the US delivered request to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was not the newspaper’s fault that the communication between the ministry and the department broke up.

As for those sensitive topics, the newspaper was left with no choice but cutting them out before publishing. Everything happened at such a short notice that they had to leave half of the paper in blank.

However, the newspaper is very clever. They put two lines  in the centre of the blank implying China’s censorship. It says:

No everyone can become a big shot, but all can understand China right here.

PS: This is a revised version of the last post. I tried to apply general writing rules and also online writing rules. Which one do you think is better?

Southern Weekly interviewed US president Barack Obama

If you get the chance to interview US president Barack Obama, what questions would you ask?

Southern Weekly, surprisingly, was hand picked by Mr. Obama to do an exclusive interview while he was visiting China last week.

Guess what questions the newspaper asked. Huma rights, freedom of speech, or internet blockage? Maybe, but none of these appeared in the published version. (full transcripts in English from white house website )

Here’s a list of questions from the published interview:

• Favorite about the trip to China
• Spare time to play basketball
• China-America cooperation in Asia-pacific area
• Schedule to acknowledge China’s market economic status
• US restrictions on high-tech export to China
• Policy on not restrain China’s rise

The interview was conducted by the Editor-in-chief of the newspaper and one of its senior journalists.

Many readers expressed their dissatisfaction about these unpointed questions, and some even displayed their contempt, because Southern Weekly has been acclaimed for its bravery of revealing social problems and government scandals. But this time, they failed readers’ expectation.

The article, together with a photo of Mr. Obama during interview, occupied only the upper half of the page; on the lower half, there was huge space, with two lines of words in the center saying “Not everybody can become a big shot, but all can understand China right here.”

The implication is that the space was there because the newspaper had no choice but having to cut out certain parts of the interview, thus leaving a huge space on the paper.

One of its senior editors also said that Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China were angry about this interview so that they sent out decrees banning other media and online websites from republishing the interview.

Writing tools: 50 essential strategies for every writer

Writing tools: 50 essential tools for every writer, as the title indicates, is a handy tool book written by Roy Peter Clark.

Roy is vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, an esteemed school for journalists and teachers of journalists.

Full texts of all handy tools were originally published as blog posts on Poynter website.

When Roy decided to publish them as a book, all posts were shortened to abstract. Nevertheless, you can still read a quick list of these tools, and even download podcasts of some of them. Here’s a few of the tools:

• Begin sentences with subjects and verbs.
• Activate your verbs.
• Fear not the long sentences.
• Cut big, then small.
• Get the name of dog.
• Repeat, repeat, repeat.
• Write toward an ending.

I’ve read all these tools years ago when there were on the web, but sadly, I failed to practice them since then.

I read them, but I didn’t own them. As the last writing tool says: “own the tools of your craft”, I have to use them whenever I write; otherwise, I won’t be able to make them my own.

So, I bought a copy yesterday for £5.82. In 2 days time, it will arrive. Can’t wait to read the book.

A headline that doesn’t make sense

While reading the Times story “Opera Winfrey says goodbye to television talk show after 25 years“, I accidentally noticed another headline which says “Focus on the big issues, not bananas”.

I was so curious that I decided to click through to find out what it is about. Here it is:

Focus on the big issues, not the bananas
Open elections, greater democracy, energy and aid should head the list for Europe’s new leaders

Alas, after 20 words, I figured out what this article is about when I see “Europe’s new leaders”.

I don’t know if there is any cultural connotations in the headline. If not, I have to say this is really a bad headline no matter how “fit” it appears to those who finish reading the article.

The intro is also terrible.  Subject is too long, and verb is too far away from the subject. Even though it comes in S-V-O format, it fails to deliver the message effectively.

I understand this is a comment article, not a piece of news, but still, it could have been better, at least in terms of headline and intro line.

BBC is said to have the best intro for its stories. I searched BBC site and here’s some of its headlines and intros:

• Is the new EU President a good choice?
  EU leaders have chosen the Belgian Prime Minister, Herman van Rompuy, as their new President. Is he the best person for the job?

• The Record: Europe
  After weeks of horse-trading and meetings in smoke-filled rooms, the top EU jobs have been appointed.

• EU foreign head dismisses critics
  One of the two newly appointed figures to the European Union’s top jobs has hit back at criticism that she does not have enough experience for the post.

PS: When I typed the headline of the Opera Winfrey story, I typed “said”, and then I realized it is “says”. This reminded me of what my TV Journalism teacher Richard said over a week ago: “Try to use the present tense to engage your audience” (not the exact words, but the meaning is there. Thanks, Richard. )

David Cameron’s “community right-to-buy” policy

David Cameron said recently that local people and organizations will be given first refusal to take over community amenities such as library, post office, sports centers, pubs, etc.

The conservative party aired Party Political Broadcast yesterday, which was very much like an election campaign advertising.

The whole clip lasts nearly 5 minutes. I was really astonished to watch it on TV, because quite obviously, this clip was broadcast as an advertising, and such a long ad. would cost the conservative party a fortune.

At first glance, you will most probably be attracted by Mr. Cameron’s eloquence in answering questions, particularly the confidence he revealed while talking to a group of questioners.

Given it a second thought, I find there are too many signs that the Q&A was not authentic but a set-up shot, no matter how good those questioners perform.

I didn’t say that they were actors. They might be real persons, by which I mean they are who they say themselves are. But they must have been told beforehand and might have been particularly invited to the site.

I don’t know if the conservative party regularly puts clips like this on TV; if not, then it’s obvious that Mr. Cameron’s election campaign has already started.

Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in China

A lot of things happened around the world in 1989, among which, the falling of Berlin Wall in Germany received the most vibrant 20th anniversary. Below is a list of other big things back then:

• American closes its Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan
• China crushed down Tiananmen Square protests
• US president George Bush Sr. announced to use military force to get Iraq out of Kuwait
• Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were sentenced to death and killed

My friend Denisa is working on a project by interviewing former journalists who reported the 1989 revolution in her home country Romania.She did a great job, getting contact of many interviewees and pursuading newspapers to publish her articles. Twenty years passed, this country has changed a lot and is learning from its history.

Yet, nothing happens in Beijing. The crushing of protesters on Tiananmen Square in 1989 is still a prohibited topic in the Chinese media. People don’t talk about it much. Some young people might even not know that it ever happened.

Making mistakes is bad, but lying about mistakes is worse, and trying to shutting the mouth of its people is the worst.

Yes, we can

US President Barack Obama admitted today for the first time that Guantanamo Bay prison couldn’t be closed in January 2010 as planned.

The reason is that the government still doesn’t know how to deal with the 215 detainees held in the prison.

Mr. Obama said he was “not disappointed” that the deadline had slipped.

Well, he might have thought about that when he signed the executive order to close the prison early this year.

John McCain,  his presidential campaign component, already spotted the problem in 22 January when Mr. Obama signed the order.

Thursday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” McCain said he thinks the new president may have been hasty in the decision and should have taken the time to consider everything associated with closing the camp before forcing himself into a timetable.

Specifically, McCain said he thought Obama needed to consider what would happen to the prisoners held at Guantanamo before ordering the facility to be closed.

Mr. Obama was acclaimed for “breaking up” with the old universally criticised Bush government. Signing orders to shut down the notorious prison was one of his first moves to this direction.

His action proved then that it was wrong to say that US president never honored their promises they gave during their presidential election campaigns. He said “change”, and he did bring changes. Good man!

However, how things turned out disappointed many.  Mr. Obama is still too young in the political arena.

Still, he can lead his supporters to chant “yes, we can”–meaning “yes, we can make changes as many times as we want”.

Blog by Hugh Hewitt

Blog: understanding the information reformation that’s changing your world is a book written by Hugh Hewitt. It was published in 2005.

Hugh states that the mainstream media will no longer be able to dominate the agenda of the society, particularly political agenda, as bloggers are swarming rapidly as a trustworthy voice.

He gave a lot of examples to prove his points. Here are just a few of them.

• Senator Trent Lott stepped down as Majority Leader over remarks implying his tendancy to racism;
• US presidential candidate John Kerry was spotting lying about spending a Christmas even in cambodia as a soldier;
• CBS presenter Rather ruined his career for reporting faked documents on George W. Bush’s military service record;

You might have read, heard or watched these stories in newspapers or on radio and TV, but they could have died out had it not been for the sake of diligent bloggers. They spontaneously wrote about these stories and successfully pushed them into the mainstream media.

Hugh continues to explain why blogs have become so powerful that they have taken away a big number of audiences from mainstream media.

He then talks about why people like you and me should blog, and what to write about.

A big part of his book is given to examples as mentioned above. It is interesting to see how bloggers spot a story, write about it, and attract so many readers that mainstream media simply can’t neglect these stories. You’ll be amazed at the details that Hugh tracked, such as which blog first wrote about a thing, who else then followed at when, etc.

Blog is actually not a book that tells you how to blog, by which I mean it doesn’t tell you any technological knowledge about starting a blog. Hugh does suggest what topics you can blog about, but he stops there without going into details. He doesn’t talk about online writing skills, either.

This book is recommended by my Online Journalism teacher David Dunkley Gyimah, and I bought it from Amazon.

If you are interested, I can lend it to you, for one week, but you can renew it unless it is requested by someone else, just as our library regulates. 🙂

Internet changed, is changing, and will continue to change our life

The Online Journalism classes will begin next week.

Needless to say, Internet has changed our life. In fact, its daily use is so essential that it now becomes almost impossible for a journalist to work without access to Internet. Even old people are trying to learn to use Internet.

To an extreme, some people become so addicted to Internet that they have to go to a doctor or a psychiatrist for consultation. To find out if you are one of them, you can take this Internet Addiction Test.

What concerns me is that Internet has fundamentally changed the way we study.

We treat information as knowledge, consider bookmarking as studying, mistake reading as thinking, and take it for granted that archiving means having mastered the knowledge.

I have been always amazed by some old people that they remember so many things. They have the habit of learning stuff by heart. Little by little, they form their own knowledge schematism. This is the traditional way of learning.

What happens with the wide application of computers and Internet is that we seldom try to memorise most of the things. We no longer turn to great minds; instead, we just “google” it, and in most cases, we are not disappointed.

I remember someone said this when TV became prevalent:

Whenever someone turns on the TV, I go back to my room and read.

Is there any chance he can still do so whenever someone turns on a computer?

By the way, this is one of the very few quotations I remembered without having to google it.

Swine flu vaccine

This is the first news clip I produced all by myself, from story selection to shooting (with the help of Jomanah, my teammate), from script writing to editing, and from voiceover to piece-to-camera.

The defects are obvious in the clip, but I still like it very much.

The most difficult part is to get interviews. I have never imagined that bringing people to talk in front of the camera could so hard, especially when you are just a student and asking for their time just to help you finish your TV assignment.  But after so much efforts, I really felt that this was also a fun part.

I used to edit a lot of news, like three to four pieces almost on a daily basis, but all the pictures were from finished products provided by AP or Reuters. Going out and filming helped me think about pictures from a totally different perspective, because this time, I was creating something instead of processing.

Here’s the script. Any comments are welcome.

Cue:

The first batch of swine flu vaccines will be delivered today. The NHS in Harrow will distribute them amid prediction that cases of the virus will soar next month.

Script:

Gordon Brown got the name of fallen soldier’s mom wrong

Gordon Brown’s spelling mistakes dragged him into trouble.

He not only got the name wrong but also committed several spelling mistakes. Here’s an excerpt from The Sun.

SPELLED Jamie incorrectly and then corrected it by scrawling over the last letter.

COMMITTED four other spelling mistakes: Greatst for greatest, condolencs for condolences, you instead of your, and colleagus for colleagues.

He also wrote the letter “i” incorrectly 18 times – mostly by leaving the dots off them but once by using two in “security”.

And he ended with a repetition – writing “my sincere condolences” and then signing off “Yours sincerely”.

As people are taking sides on Mr. Brown or Mrs. Janes, I’m wondering how this story made its way to the media at the very beginning.

Did Mrs. Jones approached The Sun in the first place? If she was extremely irritated, I don’t think she would be “calm” enough to think of talking to media and getting media to criticise the prime minister; or

did she complain to some friends or relatives who, intentionally or unintentionally, mentioned this to the media; or

some genius in The Sun suddenly sensed there could be something wrong with Gordon Brown’s writing and contacted Mrs. Janes?

I have no idea. But I agree with most people that it was rude for Gordon Brown to write both names wrong.

A few days ago when I was trying to get interviews for my TV assignment, I made a lot of phone calls. I remembered when I called Department of Health, one of their staffs refused to put me through to the person to whom I want to talk; instead, she gave me this person’s name and email address, and asked me to send email.

When I wrote the email, I worried that I might have written her name wrong. I just heard it on the telephone. So I started like this:

Dear Ms. Franca (I’m sorry if I wrote your name wrong),

I fully understand Mrs. Janes getting mad at Gordon Brown for spelling her name incorrectly and correcting his fallen son’s name in his letter instead of writing a new one.

However, she’s gone absolutely too far to record her conversation with the prime minister the next day when Gordon Brown called to say sorry, AND give to The Sun for publish. She lost my backup immediately.

It appeared to me that everything happened had been directed by The Sun. This was really ugly.

I want to ask Mrs Jones: Mam, did you think of you son when you did this?

This is the “Lead” I’m talking about

According to Melvin Mencher, author of News reporting and writing, there are two kinds of leads: direct and delayed.

Direct lead usually presents who did what at when, and sometimes where. This applies to most hard news stories.

Delayed lead usually buries the key theme of a story somewhere in the body texts (though not very down, usually in the second or third parapraph). The purpose of the lead is to attract readers to find out what actually happened. This often applies to feature stories.

There are two examples I liked so much, both of which were written by Edna Buchanan, a Pulitzer Prize-winner from The Miami Herald.

The first story was about a man with prison history named Gary Robinson. One day, he went to fried-chicken outlet and wanted to jump the line, but he was persuaded to stay in line. When his turn came, he found that the fried chicken  he wanted were sold out. What happened next was that he assaulted the woman at the counter, and a security guard shot him. Buchanan’s lead was:

Gary Robinson died hungry.

The second story was about a drug smuggler who died from broken cocaine-filled condoms he swallowed.  The lead was:

His last meal was worth $30,000 and it killed him.

What are you afraid of?

The biggest problem of working on my TV assignments was to get people agree to be interviewed, and on TV.

A councillor from HarrowCivic Center agreed to give me 15 minutes for an interview. When I arrived there, he saw the camera and said: “are you going to film this interview?”

I said “yes”. Then he became hesitated. He thought for a few seconds and said: “sorry, I can’t take video interview. You didn’t say it’s gonna be recorded.”

“It’s absolute my fault. I should have told you this.” I was stupid, and I admitted that.

No matter how I explained and requested, he just didn’t agree.

“If you just write down what I tell you, I can take the interview, but I really can’t do TV interviews,” he repeated.

If he was worried about not presenting himself well before the camera, i.e. not wearing suits, stuttering talking to camera, etc., I would be able to understand. But this man gave the impression that he was afraid of being recorded for what he was going to say. Maybe he though if anything happened, he could deny he had said anything, but if it was on TV, he would have to admit it.

He was indeed afraid of taking responsibilities. Interesting people.

Random thoughts on blogging

Suddenly got stuck on the blogging way after meeting Gordon Brown. Couldn’t think of anything to write about.

What’s the problem? I guess the reason is that I still haven’t decided the theme of this blog. I tried to focus on news, but I definitely did not want to be so niched.

Now I see why it’s hard to keep blogging about one thing. All that requires is persistence, above everything and anything else.

Shall I continue focusing on my learning of news writing and report, here in this blog?

Gordon Brown speaking to Global Fellowship students in Lancaster House

I like it when he said “worldwide campaign against globalization”.