Working as a journalist in China – Ian Johnson

 

Ian Johnson

China journalist, senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, and Pulitzer prize winner Ian Johnson discusses his time as a foreign correspondent in China since 1994. He was expelled in 2020 but returned to finish his latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, in 2023. At the Asia Society for the China Books Review Launch, he is interviewed by his former colleague Dave Barboza.

Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you interested in more stories by Ian Johnson? Do check out this list.

Assignment China opening up - Foreign correspondents in China

A nice documentary of the USC US-China Institute, a documentary of the first generation foreign correspondents in China after 1979 by Mike Chinoy (who must have been part of the second generation). Almost everybody must have been interview, including Graham Earnshaw who was representing the British agency Reuters.

European journalists could enter the country already before the famous Nixon trip to Beijing, but apart from Graham, the focus is clearly on the US veterans. I had never heard of the Philippian story, but I was a foreign correspondent from the 1990s and in Shanghai, so a part of their war stories I knew, but nice enough to have some new stories. But it was not really a sentimental journey. And we were not as close as the first generation US correspondents.

Might be nice for the current foreign correspondents who last week complained it took so long before they got their visas. China's treatment of foreign correspondents might not be perfect, but much has improved indeed. And footage from a very young Graham Earnshaw, a musical genius already in the 1980s.

Update: You can find some recent music by Graham Earnshaw here.

 

China Speakers Bureau to visit Sweden, Switzerland

Kaiser Kuo by Fantake via Flickr

In September Fons Tuinstra, president of the China Speakers Bureau, will visit both Sweden and Switzerland and is available to discuss the availability of its speakers. Stockholm is on the agenda for the first week of September, Switzerland, especially the Lausanne area, for the third week of September.
Are you interested in one of our eminent speakers? Do get in touch.

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How to become a foreign correspondent

Maria Trombly has an enthusiastic start at the SPJ-blog with a second piece, after a first piece on outsourcing journalism. She tells her US audience how to become a foreign correspondent in places like Shanghai. Well, basically the message is a sad one: you cannot. The number of official correspondents is dropping and the freelancers can only survive by making a living as an English teacher. Good overview.

Maria Trombly

Outsourcing journalism to China

You thought that China was good in making only teddy bears and jeans. Think again. Maria Trombly writes in a great column for the SPJ International Journalism Committee about her Shanghai-operation in working for mainly US-based trade publications.
Reuters has already been outsourcing to India, but Maria takes that process a step further, using staff in India to leverage the poorer language skills in China.
From her apartment in Shanghai, she recently moved to a real office, but the real action is online.

... once we had the online editorial workflow system set up, it became easy to plug people into it anywhere in the world. So there's a copy editor in Paris, for example, who uses the database to fact-check our payments stories and to answer questions from editors in Chicago while we're all asleep. And a reporter in India, Jojo Puthuparampil, uses the database to to file information on payments and securities stories. Jojo is great -- he's the most experienced of my writers, with several years covering business and stock markets for Indian papers. And he writes in fluent English, with only the occasional British "colour" or "centre" throw in.

I have been seeing Maria's operation take off from the side-lines, so can vouch her record is a pretty accurate one. What is missing is the blood, sweat and tears behind it. It sounds all very easy in the way Maria describes her China operation, but it is not. You do need an almost pathological optimistic outlook on the world to succeed her. Maria fortunately has.
In the already longer term discussion on the future of the foreign correspondent, Maria Trombly has added her own solution.

O yes. Maria is going to be one of the prominent people in our upcoming China Speakers' Bureau once she finds the time to answer some basic questions we asked her. We are sure that will be done very soon, so drop us a line if you are interested in hear Maria speak.