The China Media Project points at a first experiment at Tencent's QQ in mobilizing citizen reporters. On July 18 Jinan was hit by a devastating flood that killed 26. At QQ of Shenzhen-based Tencent editors asked for input of their users:
how is it we have only this frosty [unfeeling] information about "26 dead", 6 missing and 171 injured? We want to know how those deceased passed away, and why ... ( in a translation by the China Media project)In a few hours time, the dedicated webpage was flooded with material from local citizens, hinting a a failing local government:
Yesterday, the water flooded into our house. Our house is on the first floor. We were just sitting down to eat. Dad went off right away to find sand to fill up bags, but the water came too fast and washed the bags away. It looked like a dam had burst, and the water was putrid. Today Dad's busy building up the threshold. It's too thin and needs to be replaced. No one cares. Our government is just busy making money.
QQ is a highly successful internet service provider, belonging to the top-3 internet companies in terms of traffic and organizing a large portion of the now 162 million internet users in China. Because of that position they are very well positioned to experiment with this kind of citizen journalism and are likely to follow up after this initial success. Citizen journalism is here to stay, how to organize it, that is the question. Officially internet portals can only republish news that has been already in one of the censored traditional media, but this new feature could mean a diversion from those old restraints, if the regulators take it easy.
Update: Global Voices has a thorough overview of all the citizen reporting in China concering the floodings. Nice pictures too.
1 comment:
I read somewhere that QQ messenger has a list of forbidden words (some sexual, but mostly political) if you write them down... your message will simply not appear in your computer friends that you are talking with...
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