Where do you get your information from? - The WTO-column

(later also at Chinabiz)

When I started off in China halfway the 1990s as a foreign correspondent for a group of Dutch media, I knew my place. Of course, I was part of that highly-regarded corps of international information collectors that would influence how the world would see China. But then, since my influence was limited to a small part of the Dutch media market, that made me humble enough.

I religiously read those papers and magazines that were considered to have the clout I was lacking. Of course, those were not the Chinese papers, since they were - even more than now - the official windows of the government on an often not existing reality. They were Hong Kong based and some of you might still remember them: Asiaweek, the Far Eastern Economic Review and the South China Morning Post. They have all lost that position now. I realized that when a reporter of the South China Morning Post, not so long ago, in her weblog defended recent improvements in the paper's performance. The whole discussion seemed pretty irrelevant to me, since the paper has no serious online presence.

But already at the time, before the internet dramatically changed my life, I discovered that much of the business community was disconnected from what I considered to be leading media. Most of them claimed to be too busy to struggle through all those piles of dead trees with ink on it and in stead turned to me during meetings, picking my brain and used me as a filter on China. That was one of the reasons to start my first internet project in 1998, Chinabiz, with now 25,000 subscribers nothing close to a leading medium, but obviously helping some in the business community and giving me a bigger and more focused platform than I had back in the Netherlands.

I recalled those past discoveries as I was reading through a study of Rebecca MacKinnon on the influence of weblogs on foreign correspondents in China. Rebecca herself defected a few years ago from that other leading medium, CNN, where she had been the bureau chief in Beijing and Tokyo. She could not make the stories that were relevant according to her and turned to the internet, first as a fellow at an institute of the Harvard Law School and now as assistant professor on new media at the journalism school of the Hong Kong University.

Foreign correspondents are superconsumers of news and information, so it is interesting to see how the internet and weblogs are firmly represented on their radar screen. But the under-laying presumption is still a bit, and perhaps not strange for a former foreign correspondents, that foreign correspondents (still) matter in the way people get their information on China. But that might again be some wishful thinking.

For the foreign community in China I'm pretty sure there are no leading media anymore, and perhaps they have never been there, apart from in our own imagination.

I, for my part, are still religiously following the daily information stream, but now over my RSS-reader, and not longer delivered three days too late in a brown enveloped at my address in China in exchange for a ridiculous surcharge like in the 1990s. In my way I can follow about 200 online news sources rather effortless and construct a stream that can adjust to my fast-changing need for information and access them wherever in the world I might be. For different projects for example I now follow closely the news on Chongqing and the Chinese trade union ACFTU. I have no longer three so-called leading sources, but can read basically everything that is online. I cannot accept these sources as leading, but they provide a grid of information that might be more useful than have only a few.

Still, I'm afraid that many others are not getting that information and still use the same arguments why they did not read the Fear Eastern Economic Review, the South China Morning Post and Asiaweek in the past. Too much and too little of relevance to their lives. That should be the basis of a broader research, asking larger groups of people in China how they get their relevant information together.

Fons Tuinstra