Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post (and comments). Sinocidal (a.k.a. “Five guys hanging around in China”) has a great post today by blogger ChouChou about how to write a China article. Quick summary: * Title: China/The Dragon/The East/1.3 Billion People/Red Star + Rises/Century/Awakes/Stirs/Does Dallas * Interview a taxi driver * Add in a contrast — such as a statue of Mao with an ad for Coca-Cola in the background. * End with a vague conclution about things looking bright — or remaining unclear — for either the country or for specific individuals in it. Or combine all of the above like … Read entire article »

Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post There is a shortage of English-language writers and copyeditors in China. Especially experienced ones. The reason is that expats typically don’t stay in China for a long time – it’s stressful. They start missing their friends and parents. They want to buy shoes that aren’t four sizes too small. They want real pizza. They miss Chinese food. (There’s no Chinese food as we know it in China. Unlike India, which is full of Indian food. And Japan, which is full of sushi.) Also, copyeditors tend to be quiet, meticulous people. They’re good at punctuation and AP style. They tend not to hop on a plane and move to China. The … Read entire article »

Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post. I’ve long thought that email interviews were the lazy man’s way of researching a story. You put gother a list of questions, copy and email them to everyone who might potentially be a source — whoever writes back, you cut-and-paste their answers into your story outline, and you’ve got the article. But now it seems that some sources prefer them, too. Check out, for example, this article by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz: Interviews, Going the Way of the Linotype? An email interview, even more so than a taped interview, protects both the source and the reporter. For international journalists, email interviews have a few other advantages, as well. For example, … Read entire article »

Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post. Since I’m in the process of easing out of being a journalist, and easing into being a business owner, and this is a blog about international journalism, not about entrepreneurship, I’m going to use this forum to look back on my 15-plus years in the field. Today’s mistake: Bad record-keeping This isn’t the biggest mistake I ever made as a journalist. (I’ll save the ones that got people killed for a little later on.) But it is a mistake that bothers me more and more as times goes on. It doesn’t bother me a huge amount, but just enough. For example, I don’t know where most of my old sources are … Read entire article »

Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post. Here is our new slate of leaders at the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club: President: Duncan Hewitt (Newsweek)Vice-President, Events: Ola Wong (Sydsvenska Dagbladet)Vice-President, Membership: Astrid Freyeisen (ARD German Radio)Media Representative: Rebecca Catching (that’s Shanghai)Associate Representative: Amy Sommers (Squire Sanders and Dempsey L.L.P.)Treasurer: Alex Kauffmann (What If!) As you can see, it’s a pretty eclectic, international collection of people. That is a wonderful thing about participating in foreign correspondent clubs — you meet journalists from all around the world. For any journalist starting out in their career overseas, I strongly recommend joining such a club and getting involved. Even as a simple go-fer, you’ll meet top journalists from the … Read entire article »

Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post. Low end reporting work: Get press release. Rewrite to AP style. Call the company involved for a follow-up quote. File. High end reporting work: Research a difficult technical, financial, regulatory, medical or scientific subject. Call a dozen experts or participants. Write an in-depth, analytical story. File. Both types of work can be done by telephone and Internet. Neither require on-the-ground reporting. Here in Shanghai, we do cover a lot of Chinese stories. It helps that we have Chinese speakers on staff to read Chinese-language reports and conduct interviews. But we also cover all of Asia-Pacific, especially when it comes to the payments, securities and outsourcing industries. These are specialized fields … Read entire article »

Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post (and comments). The most common question I get from new hires — and other reporters new to China – is how to get people to talk on the record. Here’s a typical example: Assignment: are Chinese furniture manufacturers looking to buy US distributors in order to get customers, marketing and sales? Easy peasy, right? There are millions of Chinese furniture manufacturers (more or less) and this is not exactly a sensitive investigative story. Solution: I put together a list of questions — are you? why? how is it working out? what’s next for you? — and put the first writer on the job. After a week of “no comments” she quit … Read entire article »

Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post. Last night at our regular drinking get-together at Cotton’s Bar, about half-a-dozen of us expat journalists got together and complained about falling rates. Well, we also had a furious argument about whether the Economist was a real news magazine or not (my take: it tries to be, but I would give a grade of “F” because of its lack of sourcing, attribution, bylines, no error corrections, and total lack of readability). It seems that photo journalists are in a worse boat than even us print reporters. Our rates for freelance pieces haven’t budget for the last fifty years. According to the National Writers Union, top rates for national … Read entire article »

Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post (and comments). I’ve managed journalists from pretty much everywhere — the US, Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Central Asia, and, now, India and China. In my experience, the differences between individual reporters far outweight the differences between countries. In otherwords, I’ve worked with some really really bad American writers, and some really good Chinese ones – and vice versa. But there are some general differences. WRITING ABILITY Sometimes — but not always — the American writers have more experience with business reporting, or, at least, know what a news story is supposed to look like as a result of having seen a lot of them. The only difference I can actually point to … Read entire article »

Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post. The Associated Press ran an interesting story yesterday about a Chinese crook who passed himself off as a reporter or editor from the People’s Daily. Usually these kinds of bribes are for running favorable stories, or not running stories that are not so favorable. In this case, though, the guy said that he could use his influence with top officials — the People’s Daily is the main publication of the Communist Party of China — to get people promotions. But what I would like to see is the names of the people who tried to bribe this guy. Will they be seeing any jail time? I would also want … Read entire article »