But first, some housekeeping. I worked for Burson-Marsteller for six years, all here in China. It was a great experience. Much of what I know about PR and virtually all of what I know about doing PR in China I learned at Burson. I still use Burson-Marsteller China as an agency, and hold the people there in the highest regard. All agencies make mistakes. No one in PR wants to damage the reputation of a client, or their own agency. When it happens, we try to learn from it.

I don’t know what the chain of events involved in the Burson-Facebook project was, and I don’t know any of the people involved. I have no inside track. But as an industry observer, and in the spirit of learning from the situation, here are four lessons to take from this episode:

If it will embarrass you to have a pitch go public, it’s a bad pitch

The art of selling stories or viewpoints to journalists, bloggers or the public is a pitch. In writing or verbally, a pitch should stand alone as something you’d be comfortable going public on its own. If a pitch doesn’t pass that test, and its public release would embarrass you, your agency or your client, it’s a bad pitch. Any pitch that doesn’t identify the interest behind it is by definition a bad pitch, because lack of disclosure in a pitch suggests that someone would be embarrassed to be connected with it.  Rethink the strategy. Yes, this tars a whole branch of political PR based on anonymous leaks. So be it.

There’s nothing wrong with criticizing a rival…transparently

It’s silly to pretend that slamming competitors isn’t part of PR. In the industry it’s called “depositioning”, a sanitized word that suggests some lingering discomfort. Outside it might be called smearing or, for those in the tech industry, FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). So what’s the difference between a smear and a legit piece of competitive PR? Transparency, for one thing. There is nothing wrong with criticizing a rival (or a client’s rival) or pointing journalists at their shortcomings. But you’d better be prepared to stand behind your claims, and that means being well researched and transparent.

PR instincts and journalism instincts are not the same

PR agencies hire a lot of ex-journalists for their story instincts and their usefulness in media relations due to their contacts and credibility with other journalists (more on this below). But the fit isn’t always natural. Someone senior from a global agency other than Burson told me recently that they have about a ten percent long-term stick-rate from their senior journalist hires in the US. I’m not surprised.

One problem is that although they overlap, journalist instincts and PR instincts are not the same. Oversimplified, journalistic instincts emphasize spotting and piecing together stories while PR instincts often emphasize identifying and managing risks. We spend as many years and as much work developing our instincts as journalists spend developing theirs. Any crossover in either direction means a learning curve. The risk that should have been spotted in this particular case was that the backstory of the pitch –an anonymous client paying a major PR firm to slam Google on privacy– was more interesting than the pitch itself.

Set a thief to catch a thief

Despite the blurring of the line between mainstream media and blogging, journalists and bloggers are different. If you send a bad pitch to a mainstream journalist, generally it just dies (perhaps along with some of your credibility). If you send a bad pitch to a blogger, there’s every chance it’s going to published and ridiculed. Welcome to blogging. This isn’t 2003, and everyone should be up on this. I understand hiring mainstream journalists to pitch other mainstream journalists, but it seems to me that the PR industry has been slow to embrace using bloggers the same way. As a blogging PR person I don’t think bloggers are particularly more resistant to working in PR, but I definitely think they respond to PR differently than mainstream journalists. And that’s definitely true for tech bloggers.

Thoughts? Feel free to argue with me.

See also:

Lou Hoffman’s “Ishmael’s Corner”: More to the Facebook PR campaign against Google story

Various media became gradually detached from the leadership of the Communist Party. The principle of the Party spirit [in journalism} (党性原则) is a fundamental principle of socialist news work. Adhering to the Party's leadership of news work is at the core of the principle of the Party spirit [in journalism]. However, not only did Gorbachev’s news reform not keep to this, it openly abolished this “administrative intrusion” on cultural and propaganda work (文化宣传工作), so that Party leaders from the national level down to the local level dared not exercise their leadership over cultural propaganda offices and public opinion organs under their jurisdiction, allowing them to act as they pleased and govern themselves.

This in fact amounted to the abandonment of the Party spirit [in journalism] and a discarding of the Party’s leadership over news work. In June 1990, the USSR’s Supreme Soviet passed its News and Publishing Law (新闻出版法) ruling that government organs, political parties, social organizations, religious groups, and citizens of the age of 18 or over “all have the right to establish public opinion tools [or media].” This was a green light for the “free operation of publications” (自由办报), ensuring the legitimization of publications launched by political parties and individuals. By October that year there were already more than 700 newspapers, magazines and journals registered [in the Soviet Union], including those from 13 different political parties. Of these, one-seventh were registered by individuals, and privately-operated news services had also appeared.

…and then everything went to hell in a handbasket.

Read the whole thing on the China Media Project site.

I put a link to Gady Epstein’s excellent post on the recent dairy industry PR meltdown in my own earlier post on the topic, but it’s worth coming back to at more length (and not just because I’m referenced in it). Gady’s post is one of the very best discussions of the dark side of PR in China in any source, and anyone interested in the topic should give it a careful read.

Gady remarks a bit on the possible origins of the scheme to undermine competitors through black PR, including referring indirectly to a comment in my own post where I said I felt it a bit too conspiratorial (actually, I said “Snidely Whiplash”, but if you didn’t grow up watching cartoons in the ’70s*, I meant “conspiratorial”) to suppose that the plot had originated at the highest levels of Mengniu management. On that point, Gady writes:

BossePR has worked with Mengniu’s most senior executives for years, people above An up to the very top. Do you conduct black-bag special ops at the behest of a division head if it is against the wishes or previous inclinations of more senior managers?

I suppose it depends how explicit those wishes or previous inclinations are.

Bear in mind that this is all speculation and conjecture. I think that it is plausible that a plan to discredit rivals was hatched or at least discussed at the very top of Mengniu. It would be dumb of said management, but it is plausible. However, I also think that it is entirely likely that top management involvement, if any, could have been more indirect. I would have little trouble believing either a sort of Thomas Becket, “will no one rid me of this turbulent dairy priest?” situation, or a win-at-any-cost culture tolerant of sketchy behavior in the pursuit of business goals.

In any of the above situations, top management would still deserve a good share of the blame. In practice, it seems more likely that a bunch of mid-level types and agency people will get their heads rolled, with the damage stopping a comfortable distance from the executive suites.

There is nothing particularly Chinese about discrediting rivals. It is a time honored PR tactic often referred to by the antiseptic term “depositioning”, which makes it seem vaguely professional and like you’re not engaging in some kind of wicked skullduggery. In fact, your skullduggery may be someone else’s hard-nosed marketing. Witness the technology industry’s time honored tactic of dispensing FUD –fear, uncertainty and doubt– about rivals. The trick is to employ some subtlety and to not to cross the magic line separating FUD from, oh, libel. Plus, the self-infatuation of many technology executives means the source of FUD is often –though not always– clear. If Steve Jobs is trashing Android, well, he’s pretty clearly talking his book, as it were.

What is particularly Chinese about this case is that it involves a complex skein of intertwined ethical problems across multiple industries. If you have a media that easily falls into bed with big companies and an ethical environment that tolerates PR firms willing to sock puppet for cash and a public primed to believe the worst of scandal-plagued industries, well then you have a recipe for trouble.

It’s great that Chinese media blew the lid off this, but there are plenty more lurking scandals where this one came from.

Speaking of Gady and dairy, looks like I’ll be back on Sinica this week, with Gady pinch-hosting for traveling Kaiser, as we discuss PR in China as well as some other interesting stuff.

*Snidely Whiplash was the villain from the Dudley Do-Right cartoons. He was played by Alfred Molina in the 1999 Brendan Fraser clunker, but I’ll always remember him like this:

Curses! Foiled again!

A Rashomon moment, perhaps? Obviously this was destined to be a delicate issue. Regardless of who’s territorial claims you’re inclined to side with, the illustrations –and divergent descriptions– will help inflame public opinion on both sides.

Hat tip: Danwei.

Bang! The Chinese point of view.

See also:

ChinaSmack: Chinese Fishing Boat Captain Arrested By Japanese, Reactions

• Become interested in fish
• Pass organic chemistry
• Get a marine biology degree
• Find out how much marine biologists make
• Pick another line of work

Actually, in my case, the “other line of work” was radio, which turned out be even less lucrative than a career in marine biology, and far more punishing to the self-esteem, so it wasn’t exactly the most direct course. I mention this not because I expect readers to have an overwhelming fascination in Imagethief’s early career disasters (although ask me about the squirrel assassination job sometime), but because I still have an interest in things marine. I was therefore interested to see an article in the New York Times on the Chinese launching the world’s deepest diving research submarine.

If the US launched the world’s deepest-diving research submarine, the story would be a paragraph in the back of the weekly “science” section, right near the advertisement for Smithsonian commemorative plates. But a Chinese research submarine gets 1200 words on page A1 (of the New York edition at least, not sure if it was A1 in the national edition), and this lede:

When three Chinese scientists plunged to the bottom of the South China Sea in a tiny submarine early this summer, they did more than simply plant their nation’s flag on the dark seabed.

The men, who descended more than two miles in a craft the size of a small truck, also signaled Beijing’s intention to take the lead in exploring remote and inaccessible parts of the ocean floor, which are rich in oil, minerals and other resources that the Chinese would like to mine. And many of those resources happen to lie in areas where China has clashed repeatedly with its neighbors over territorial claims.

The article goes on to talk about how the submersible puts China in “an excellent position” to go after the “trillions of dollars” worth of minerals on the ocean floor as well as the various undersea cables, sunken nuclear weapons, and other intelligence prizes. The article also gets into the prevailing America-in-decline sentiment, remarking on our past lead in research submersibles.

Technically, I suppose there is some truth in all of this. Still, I can’t help but feel that this article takes what should be middling-interesting science news and makes it bigger by wrapping it in all the current American hysterias surrounding the rise of China. Seriously: It’s a research submersible. It needs a surface tender. Nothing it does is going to be especially secret. Unless this thing is Stingray or does that flying-submarine thing from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea it’s probably not something to get all worked up about. It just doesn’t seem like a balance of power moment.

Maybe I’m guilty of over-reacting myself, in this case to one article. Still, as Americans much of China’s influence on us is what we ourselves make of it. If our prevailing narrative of China requires us to turn even the launch of a research submersible into an aspect of national rivalry for the globe’s resources then we’re really sailing for trouble.

Although, who knows. Maybe the nations contesting maritime claims with China feel differently.

Spot the Chinese-made parts.

Note: Title of this post with the deepest of apologies to the Beatles.

Erickson isn’t “selling out” in the traditional sense of the word, that is, he’s not morphing into a press release writer or a corporate communications executive. He will instead remain a reporter — just one who’s getting a paycheck from the only company on his beat. Call him a corporate journalist.

…

Erickson, who co-wrote a biography of Bill Gates, is the managing editor of the site — and, at the moment, its only writer. Alibaba, which believes this initiative is the first of its kind, say it’s not a marketing tool but rather a “quasi-independent news outlet.”

“All my life I’ve known journalists who have gone over to what we call ‘the dark side,’” Erickson says. After 25 years in journalism and a brutal layoff, he felt Alibaba offered him a middle ground: “I could still be a journalist, but I wouldn’t be subject to the same constant financial pressures.”

I’ll give this to Alibaba Group: I think they’re one of the few Chinese firms that gets international PR. Granted Alibaba is not cut from the same cultural cloth as the big SOEs and red-chip firms, but even controlling for that they’ve done a good job telling their story.

Although it still feels like a work-in-progress (and is labeled “beta”), Alizila is a good idea. This is the digital age, and as mainstream media are stretched ever more thinly companies need to get better at telling their own stories directly to the audiences that matter to them.

But I wonder about two things. First is the effort taken to stress that Mr. Erickson remains a journalist and not a PR person. As a PR person, when I look at this site I see PR: A house platform for telling stories about the company and making the company more visible.

In the end, can you be a journalist in the sense most of us understand it and report impartially on a daily basis on the company cutting your paycheck? What will happen when there’s a real crisis or serious problem that demands coverage or investigation? What will happen the first time someone in an executive suite wants to kill or amend one of Mr. Erickson’s stories?

Some of the stories on Alizila do delve into Alibaba’s challenges, but none of them is what I would call confrontational. Ms. Alberts quotes Mr. Erickson remarking on an Alizila article he wrote on Alibaba’s efforts to tackle counterfeits on the site, saying, “I’m certainly not going for the jugular, but if you’re in PR it goes against every instinct in your body, because you are drawing attention to the fact that there are fakes on the website.”

I’m in PR, and as an outside observer it doesn’t go against every instinct in my body. The availability of pirate goods on Alibaba isn’t a secret that’s being suddenly revealed. Personally, I’d see a post on steps the company is taking to control a known problem, even one that embeds some criticisms or discusses past problems, as generally positive. If that story had been on a third-party news site, I’d grade it as positive with regards to Alibaba because of the emphasis on the company’s actions to resolve the problems and the positioning of the piracy problem as a widespread issue afflicting the entire industry (a classic PR technique, “broadening”). If it had been a story earned through PR, it’d be good PR.

The second question is why jump through hoops to make this look like a news site rather than harnessing Mr. Erickson’s talent and experience as a straightforward company blogger? He could cover the same topics, dig into general industry news, use a more engaging voice, and probably achieve similar visibility results for the company, without having to maintain what to me seems like an unsustainable air of impartiality. He could be an advocate in the best possible way.

Perhaps it has to do with how the audience they’re trying to reach will perceive a blog as against something that looks like a news site (although they’re also active on several conspicuously American social media networks). Or perhaps it’s simply the approach that everyone is comfortable with. There is a blog on Alizila, but although the posts seem shorter than the “news” articles, the voice is similar.

Ultimately, Alizila is PR. There’s nothing wrong with that. They should embrace it and be proud. Get past the “dark side” stuff. Good, honest communication and good storytelling are both part of good PR. And there is certainly a role for journalistic skills in good PR, nutting out the stories and telling them well (which is why our industry is full of ex-journalists, although Imagethief is not among them). But trying to distance such efforts from PR strikes me as disservice to PR and journalism alike.

With all that in mind, I think Alizila is interesting, especially coming from a Chinese company. I’m curious to see where they take it and if they launch a Chinese version.

[T]he front page graphic at the time I’m writing this is a big yellow circle with two much smaller circles below it. It’s supposed to represent the population of China (1.3B) vs. the population of Beijing (12M) vs. the population of Dalian (2.3M) vs. the population of Qiqihar (1M).

Problem is, the proportional difference in the cities’ populations is represented by the DIAMETER of the circle, not the area of the circle. Take a look. Beijing’s circle is not 1/100th the area of China’s, it’s 1/100th the diameter. Likewise with Dalian’s circle & Qiqihar’s circle. So the visual representation is that Beijing is 0.01% of China’s population, rather than 1%.

This is what makes visual representations powerful, of course: what *I* mean by the visual representation of the data may not be what you interpret. Or it can be precisely what I WANT you to interpret.

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics; and then there are visual representations of data. Come to think of it, PR firms and departments should really get behind this…”

So, a few things. First, the graphic in question was in an objective sense wrong, applying a linear formula to a visual representation that was based on area. This was pointed out by a commenter on the Chinfographics site, and to their credit the guys have responded and are addressing it.

Second, Bob, makes a good point. What an author means to communicate through a visualization may not necessarily be the same as how an audience perceives it. Sometimes they can be confusing. More insidiously, because of their power to communicate complex data in very simple ways, visualizations can be also be used to intentionally distort information.

This is not a problem unique to data visualizations. As anyone who followed the Chinese response to CNN and BBC photographs of the Tibet unrest of a couple of years ago, the same thing can happen with the selection and cropping of photographs or video, or even in the editing and presentation of text. How often has a joke in an IM, e-mail or, ahem, blog comment been misunderstood because of missing context that was obvious to the author, but not to the recipient?

But the same storytelling power that makes data visualization so powerful when used well makes them dangerous when inaccurate or distorted. That argues for caution and thoroughness. In the words of that great sage, Uncle Ben Parker, with great power comes great responsibility.

Also, for what’s it worth, in addition to data visualizations there are very good storytelling infographics that are not data based. One now classic (though slightly controversial) example is designer Yang Liu’s “East vs. West” series showing differences in Asian and European culture. Another example is a Men’s Health article that explains the caloric impact of some beverages by showing them next to collections of other junk foods with the same calorie count. There are also various visualizations and infographics for the great Gulf oil spill. These include a Google Earth plugin that superimposes the spill’s area (an admittedly incomplete representation of a three-dimensional catastrophe) over various urban areas, and a complex infographic (large image) on the spill from a company that creates editorial infographics .

What do you see?Image from Infographicworld.com via the Daily Green.

Now China might be getting something like that for itself thanks to a new blog called Chinfographics, dedicated to visualizations of things Chinese. They’re off to a good start:

They also provide links to the raw data. I hope they can keep it up. There are obviously many things to be explored in China.

One of the reasons why I like this site, and visualizations and infographics in general, is that I think they’re something that PR departments and agencies are often bad at. We’re in the business of telling stories on behalf of our clients or employers in ways that people can easily relate to. Unfortunately, all too often what we come up with is an impenetrably dull press release or stock photo ops. When we have the right kinds of stories, wouldn’t things like this be much cooler?

Hat tip: Danwei.

Readers in America: When was the last time any of you went to a Confucius Center? I thought so. How about watched a Chinese television program or a Chinese movie that wasn’t directed by Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige? See any Chinese brands last time you walked down the street? Ever had an American tell you they think Hu Jintao is super cool? Driven a Chinese car lately? Right. Whereas here, people feast on American pop culture (especially TV and movies), the street corners are a plague of American fast food labels and Buick is an aspirational brand. Leaving aside your opinions as to the value of McDonalds and Starbucks as ambassadors of American values, let’s not get all hysterical about the Confucius Centers or wallow in insecurity about America’s cultural influence until poor American refugees start seeking a better life in Fujian.

In fact, China’s government is well aware of its soft-power deficit with regard to the US (see also this article on Danwei), and has been investing in building up its capabilities. International news is one of the key areas of investment, thus the revamping and expansion of China’s foreign-language media organizations. This has included a refresh of the venerable China Daily, the launch of the surprisingly interesting English edition of the Global Times, the revamping of CCTV’s English language station, and more. Most recently, the Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about Xinhua’s plans to roll out an international television news service:

China’s state news agency announced the launch of a global English-language television channel, part of a broader international push by the country’s government media aimed at countering the dominance of Western news outlets and conveying a Chinese perspective on events.

Xinhua news agency said trial broadcasts of the new 24-hour TV service, called China Network Corp., or CNC, will start Saturday, and the station will be fully operational July 1. CNC will be available by satellite, cable systems, the Internet and cellphones, Xinhua said, and will carry a range of programming on news, business and lifestyle issues.

“CNC will offer an alternative source of information for a global audience and aims to promote peace and development by interpreting the world in a global perspective,” Xinhua quoted its president, Li Congjun, as saying at a launch ceremony Friday.

Well, maybe.

I fully understand and even support the motivation behind this. China is a globally important country and has a right to be represented in international media. And as American news media continues its slow-motion implosion, you’d think this would be a good time for them to make their move. Nevertheless, I have a history of rolling my eyes at Chinese efforts to improve their international media efforts. This is not because I am some kind of cynical bastard (although that might also be true) or because I doubt China’s technical competence (I do not). It is because I feel that the natural control-freak inclinations of the Chinese government toward media essentially preclude any ability to develop a news organization with real, international credibility.

The objective–the real objective–is important. If the goal is simply to further disseminate the usual propaganda, then fine, they can do whatever they want. They’ll all feel good about themselves. But no one will watch.

If, on the other hand, the goal is to develop an international media organization that can compete with what’s already offered in English and offer a legitimately different but respectable perspective, then they’ll need to break their traditional mold a bit. Al Jazeera is perhaps the model here. It emerged from a country and region not known for a liberal approach to media and established itself as a serious and credible news organization largely on the back of its Iraq and Afghan war coverage. It did so while still presenting a point of view that was a clear alternative to most western media. They were helped along by some good journalism and slick packaging.

I don’t want to overwork the comparison. For one thing, Al Jazeera has had its problems (including serious personnel issues at their English service a couple of years ago). China certainly has the resources to try something similar to Al Jazeera, but it has some very different political and institutional factors to wrestle with than Qatar did. Also, the world isn’t necessarily screaming for an Asian alternative. Remember, Singapore has already tried the international TV news stunt with Channel News Asia, and it has had only modest international success at best. Even Al Jazeera kind of limped along for several years until it found its purpose and voice after 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. One hesitates to imagine a Chinese news organization blossoming in the heat of such a controversial international incident.

So with all that in mind, here are a few things I think China should do if it is really serious about launching a successful international television news network.

Base it in Hong Kong
Let’s face it, as wonderful as Beijing is, nobody is going to take a Beijing-headquartered international news organization seriously. By my thorough calculations, credibility will increase by the square of the distance from Zhongnanhai. This will be especially true if your parent organization is formally a branch of the Central Publicity Department, as Xinhua is. Technically that probably makes Lima or Buenos Aires the best option, but since those might be impractical, how about Hong Kong? Hong Kong is an established media hub with a veneer of press freedom that will be important in helping a new network to establish itself. It’s visa situation will be easier for pundits and professionals, especially the foreigners (see the next point). And, hey, it’s still China, right? Beijing has no trouble calling the shots in Legco, so it could probably manage a Hong Kong-based media organization without too much headache.

Hire pros to do it
Al Jazeera raided the BBC Arabic service when it started, and then raided the BBC again when it started its English service. China should do something similar. There are a lot of good, unemployed journalists around these days, including TV journalists. Avoid the second-stringers and discount talent and hire some heavy hitters for the editing and mainstream talent. Go for some recognizable brand-names. This will be hard because most such people won’t want to work in a Chinese news organization. Basing it in Hong Kong will help, but people will have to believe it will be doing serious journalism.

Also, make sure the production values are competitive with the best out there. No college broadcasting, please.

Cover China for real
This is another area where the Al Jazeera comparison breaks down. Al Jazeera was able to concede limits to its ability to cover its patron’s country, Qatar. Fortunately for them, nobody outside Qatar much cares what happens there, and there are plenty of sexier, more powerful and weirder places in the Gulf, let alone the broader middle East.

This won’t work for China, however. China is pretty much story number one out of Asia these days. How a Chinese international news network covers China will be a key part of how it is evaluated by audiences. The real test will come when, inevitably, such an organization has to cover a serious disaster or bout of civil unrest in China. What plays domestically will not play internationally, especially when people are comparing the coverage to other international media organizations. With all due respect to the Chinese people, who have been poorly served by foreign media on more than one occasion, most people outside of China–even non-Westerners–don’t spend their time grumbling about how crappy and one-sided coverage of China is. So don’t waste too much energy tilting at that particular windmill.

I’m not sure how China could manage this. It might have to credential its own news organization’s China journalists as foreign media. Now wouldn’t that be something.

Less scolding, more seduction
We understand that this operation is there to present China’s point of view, but a little bit of nuance is called for. Sometimes, the organization is going to have to cover the Dalai Lama, or Rebiyah Kadeer, Taiwan’s DPP, or other people the Chinese government finds distasteful. The moment the announcers start slipping into hostile language about black elements, jackals (jackals always get a bad rap), splittist criminals, etc. it’s all over. By all means, be more sympathetic to the Chinese government point of view, but do without with the theatrical, throwback language that alienates foreigners and reminds people that the propaganda mission always comes first. Find articulate, polished spokespeople to present the Chinese government point of view and let them, rather than the journalists or newsreaders, present the government’s points.

Don’t forget the rest of the world
It shouldn’t be all China, all the time. Global news organizations report on, yes, the globe. If the big news of the day is from somewhere outside of China, let’s make sure we don’t lead with what the Standing Committee did today, in protocol order, and doesn’t Uncle Wen look nice with the bouquet those schoolgirls gave him. That means opening a lot of bureaus and sending hardcore journalists to interesting places. With many western media organizations in retreat, there are plenty of parts of the globe that could and should be covered better, and where China might get better access than Western media organizations. Africa and Central Asia come to mind. China has the resources and can do this if it wants to.

Or it could all be a fantasy. I’d be interested to see China come up with something polished, interesting and watchable. There have certainly been signs of life from corners of the Chinese English-language media in the last few years. But given the history, especially in the heavily state-managed regime of television, it’s hard to be optimistic.

Hesser used to be the New Yorker’s man in Beijing and is the author of River Town, Oracle Bones and, most recently, Country Driving. River Town probably holds the distinction of being the China book most other contemporary arrivals wish they had written.

The sound quality during the introduction, which is four minutes long, is awful, but the rest of the interview is fine. Its available for free on iTunes or on the web.

Yes, but other than talent, initiative and willpower, why didn't I write that?

NewsMorphosis panel on the Transformation of the News from Jay Fidell on Vimeo.

The week before last Imagethief was in Hawaii to participate in the NewsMorphosis panel organized by ThinkTech Hawaii and several other organizations. The last week or so since I got back have been a bit hectic, so I haven’t had a chance to write anything about the conference, or the activities around it.

The whole conference was streamed live, and the video is still available. I’ve posted the two videos below the jump, below . There is about four hours worth, so, while it was a great conference, unless you’re truly dedicated you may want to pick and choose a bit. I’ve included a bit of a rundown, below, but the easiest thing to do is to look at the program, here (pdf) and bear in mind that the opening remarks by Avi Soifer, dean of the University of Hawaii’s law school, is about half an hour, each of the three panels is an hour, and the closing speech on the Peer News program, by John Temple, is a half hour or so. (John Temple’s remarks also on Vimeo here, and Avi Soifer’s remarks here.)

I appear in the first panel along with Honolulu Advertiser editor Mark Platte and Hawaii News Now news director Chris Archer. The three of us about how new technology is affecting the business of news. It’s definitely an interesting discussion, and very relevant. Hawaii News Now, which is the television news gathering service shared by two of Hawaii’s major TV stations, just finished a massive consolidation and technology revamp to enable them to serve multiple stations. The Honolulu Advertiser, long Hawaii’s newspaper or record, was recently sold by Gannett to its smaller, local rival, and will be closed soon unless something dramatic happens. So my fellow panelists are both dealing first-hand with the remaking of the American news industry. As the sole participant from overseas, my job was to bring a little foreign perspective.  I also appear in the brief wrap up with TechCrunch journalist Sarah Lacey (our star power for the day) and Michael Freedman.

While I was there I had a chance to visit both the Hawaii News Now and Honolulu Advertiser offices, along with Michael Freedman, a fellow speaker, longtime CBS newsman, and now executive director of George Washington University’s Global Media Center. It was a visceral lesson in the state of news in America. The television operation has gone through a lot of consolidation, but it at least had a sense of vitality about it. They’ve recently revamped all of their technology and workflow to server several broadcasters. Having spent a couple of years in the newsroom of San Francisco’s CBS affiliate, KPIX, I got a little tingle of nostalgia. The Advertiser, however, is at death’s door. Their newsroom has been shrinking for some time, the building looks like it hasn’t had a dime of maintenance in living memory, and they were recently sold by the Gannett group to their smaller local rival, the Star-Bulletin. They’re all on death-watch now, and the newsroom is a mix of gallows humor and grim resignation to fate. The spot in the newsroom where the sale was announced by the publisher has been roped off with crime-scene tape, and there is a little masking tape body-outline in the shape of a newspaper on the floor. It was an interesting experience.

More below.

Unfortunately, the Ustream video player is a bit primitive, so finding the right spots can mean a bit of fishing, but it can be done. My panel starts at 31 minutes into the first video, with my opening remarks at 45 minutes and closing remarks at 1:28.

I also appear in the closing panel, at 1:03 in the second video, with my remarks at 1:04:30.

Enjoy. If you have the persistence to dig it out. If they post the individual panels, I’ll update.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Alerted by YouKu, BusinessWeek presumably put pressure on Sohu because the Chinese interview transcript vanished by the next day, along with many of the reprints on other Chinese websites. If you’re curious, and read Chinese, a few instances remain online. The BusinessWeek story by Mr. Einhorn is also now available online. It is interesting to compare the two, although Imagethief suggests reading the transcript with some caution for reasons that shall be explained below.

Imagethief has no idea what transpired between Mr. Einhorn and Sohu in arranging and conducting the interview, but I’d bet actual money that an agreement for Sohu to publish their own transcript of the interview was not part of the deal. Another Western business journalist told me today that such a move was pretty likely to piss off a publication on any number of levels. Really, I didn’t have much trouble guessing that on my own. In general, Chinese companies have a lot to learn about working with Western media, but I can’t imagine the Economic Observer, 21st Century Business Herald or Caijing (even with its current woes) sitting still for such a move either. The fast removal of the transcript from Sohu suggests that publication took BusinessWeek by surprise.

There were a couple of problems with what Sohu did. First, and most basically, they used a journalist’s interview to create and publish material that pre-empted that journalist’s story. That’s just plain rude, and probably won’t be soon forgotten. As a media organization itself, Sohu, of all companies, should know better. But it goes beyond that. Mr. Einhorn is an experienced journalist writing for a publication with a reputation to protect. As you would expect, his story on the lawsuits between the two companies is balanced and includes quotes from both Sohu and Youku.

The transcript published on Sohu, however, included only brief questions and Mr. Zhang’s responses. Sohu’s introduction presents the transcript as “an interview with BusinessWeek journalist Bruce Einhorn”, which is literally correct, but appropriates BusinessWeek’s credibility for a one-sided view on a contentious issue. That same introduction characterizes Sohu rival Youku extremely negatively, saying that the discussion would, “reveal the details of Youku’s piracy and rights infringement.” Not much balance there. BusinessWeek might run executive Q&As, but it’s safe to say they wouldn’t stake out such a negative position in an article that didn’t give Youku space to respond, and that wasn’t backed up by copious facts and extensive reporting. Interviews are raw material. A transcript of a single interview is not a story, and putting BusinessWeek’s name on the interview is a misrepresentation.

Readers also have no way of knowing if the transcript is accurate or how it may have been edited. Any Q&A interview is likely to be edited, but a publication editing a Q&A for tightness or focus is not the same thing as a company editing a transcript to better present its point of view. Imagethief knows from experience that editing of interview transcripts by PR teams is common practice in China (many journalists expect a transcript by e-mail following an interview), and a reading with a critical eye is well advised. However, the imprimatur of BusinessWeek on the transcript implies that BusinessWeek itself had the final cut, not Sohu. That looks like another misrepresentation.

It’s sensible policy for companies and PR teams to record their own versions of interviews with journalists. A recording enables you to check the accuracy of final quotes, provides leverage if you need a correction or clarification, and can help out if the journalist has a problem with their own recording (it has been known to happen). Recorded interviews with experienced spokespeople can also often be good source material for messages, sound-bites and other content. However, publishing or leaking recordings or transcripts in their entirety is a bad idea if you want to preserve your media relationships.

There is only one situation in which I would suggest to a client publishing verbatim portions of an interview transcript. If a story has already run with an inaccurate or wildly out-of-context quote that I feel misrepresents a spokesperson or client company, and if I can’t get the publication to correct the quote or issue a clarification, I might suggest that the client publish an appropriate excerpt of the transcript on a PR page or company blog. I would only recommend an excerpt, and I would include an explanatory note of why the excerpt is being published and a link to the original article. I would also notify the publication that I was going to do this.

Running the transcript also hints at a deeper issue. It would have been simplicity itself to have a Sohu journalist interview Mr. Zhang for the exact same responses (or to put the same material on Mr. Zhang’s blog, which appears to have been fallow since July). An admittedly cursory search of Sohu today didn’t turn up any such articles since the founding of the Alliance last month. Why not?

News organizations are generally disinterested (as opposed to uninterested) in the news they are reporting. When reporting on issues in which they have an interest, such as the fortunes of their parent companies, good news organizations take pains to be balanced in order to preserve their reputations. There are op-ed pages and blogs for points-of-view (not to mention the occasional leaked letter to ownership). Sohu is hardly a disinterested party in the lawsuit with Youku or in the fortunes of the Online Video Anti Piracy Alliance, which it founded and largely speaks for. Running the transcript of the BusinessWeek interview might just have been a mistake. Or it might have seemed like a way for Sohu to have the best of both worlds: A splendidly one-sided interview that carried that authority of a respected, international business magazine and that didn’t seem to compromise their own newsroom.

But in the long run you can’t have it both ways. And for a company listed on America’s NASDAQ, annoying Western business media in attempt to have it both ways is probably not a great PR strategy.

Disclosures: I found out about this episode from a friend who works for Youku. In my job I also regularly work with journalists from Sohu’s news organization, all of whom are completely professional. I have no opinion on the merits of the various lawsuits flying back and forth between Youku and Sohu.

…a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or “from the gut” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

Miraculously, the entry goes on for another 3400 words on the concept of truthiness, proving not so much that truthiness is an important concept as that Wikipedia is balls-out for pop culture. Nevertheless, “truthiness” has transcended its comic-neologism origins to become a legitimate word, which says something about the zeitgeist.

Imagethief wishes that Colbert had similarly enshrined the concept of “newsiness”. Borrowing from the definition above, newsiness could be described as a satirical term to describe things that a person claims is important or newsworthy without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts. It feels like news, whether it really is or not.

This is something that we flacks are familiar with. At our worst PR types trade in newsiness, packaging up bits of corporate dander and passing them off as significant. But we’re not exclusively to blame. Sometimes newsiness arises spontaneously in the form of a story that is less than meets the eye. Last week’s story concerning the collapse of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention’s new website under apparently heavy traffic strikes me as an example of newsiness.

Foreign coverage of this story can be traced backed to a Beijing Youth Daily article, which I don’t have a link for, and a subsequent English-language Xinhua report that was deftly massaged into final form by our own Chris O’Brien of Beijing Newspeak. The story was that the recently constituted National Bureau of Corruption Prevention, a relatively toothless body set up to “collect and analyze information” on corruption, launched a new website that included a guestbook function enabling members of the public to post semi-anonymous comments. However the website crashed within hours of launch due to a “large number of visitors”.

This fits very nicely into one of those social-issue memes that define much foreign news coverage of China, and that often take the form of “a nation struggling with [insert social issue here]“. Examples are a nation struggling with pollution; a nation struggling with censorship; a nation struggling with Internet addiction; and so on. The issues are set up via colorful or heartstring-yanking anectodes often involving stoic, salt-of-the-earth 老百姓 types recalling their woes, and rounded out with a mix of quotes from NGOs/overseas experts/local academics/old China hands and the kind of eye-popping statistics that China excels at generating and that make pretty much any problem here seem thoroughly intractable.

In fact, much good journalism is done this way and it works well for the home audience that reads one newspaper. But if, like Imagethief, you are a news junkie living in China and you read vast troughs of China coverage from a range of publications, it’s hard not not to notice the formula.

This system also promotes the dissemination of lightweight stories that simply fit into issues established by precedent. This particular story originated via the Xinhua article, which seems to have originated as a “why our website went down” disclosure formality. It plugged nicely into the “nation struggling with corruption” meme and was duly picked up by the foreign press, almost all of which cited the Xinhua article. The tone and detail of the foreign stories vary a bit, but looking at the headlines and ledes a clear mental picture emerges:

Reuters:
China anti-graft Web site felled by “too many hits”
BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese government Web site encouraging citizens to report corruption crashed on its first day under the weight of too many hits.

AFP:
China anti-graft website crashes under public complaints
BEIJING (AFP) — The website of China’s new anti-graft bureau crashed shortly after going online due to the huge volume of messages from the public complaining about rampant corruption, state media said Wednesday.

Telegraph:
China’s new anti-corruption website crashes
A Chinese government website set up for the public to complain about corruption crashed within a day of launching under the volume of cases reported.

The website was constructed by the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention to collect information on corrupt activities as part of an ongoing purge by the Beijing authorities.

Associated Press:
Anti-graft Web site swamped in China
BEIJING: A new Web site created by China’s anti-corruption bureau crashed after barely a day because too many visitors had tried to log on to register complaints, state media reported Wednesday.

Washington Post:
Chinese Assail Official Misconduct With Fervor
BEIJING, Dec. 19 — China’s new National Bureau of Corruption Prevention thought it would be a good idea to open a Web site for citizens to denounce crooked officials. The idea was so good that the site was immediately deluged this week by irate Chinese, overwhelming the system and causing several crashes during the first two days of operation.

So what did you see in your head? Imagethief saw an image of zillions of oppressed Chinese people desperately clicking on the NBCP’s web page. This is image was helped along by the recent, widely publicized woes of BOCOG’s Olympic ticket sales website, which really did crash under the fevered clicking of zillions of people. But unlike the Olympic ticketing stories, in which the actual traffic and transaction load on the site was reported, the only figure in any of the stories above is the number of pages of comments, ranging from 16 to “more than 20″. Only the AP story lists a specific number of comments: 250. An NBCP official was quoted in the Xinhua article as saying, “The number of visitors was very large and beyond our expectations.”

Well, yes, but what were your expectations?

Hoping to find more information, Imagethief took himself to the site for a first-hand look. As of last Friday there were still about 20 pages of comments, each with fifteen individual posts, for a total of about 300. Anyone who has spent time on a popular Chinese blog or in the forums knows that this is pretty small beer. For comparison, when CCTV 9 anchor Rui Chenggang condemned the Forbidden City Starbucks on his Sina blog just under a year ago, he got 450 comments in 24 hours, on his way to nearly 3000. Sam Flemming’s CIC, which monitors Chinese online buzz, tracked over 4 million posts on automobiles in the three-month period from April-June of this year (full report — PDF, registration required).

These are not entirely fair comparisons. The degree of freedom people feel to comment about corruption is not the same as they feel to comment on the Chery QQ or foreign coffee shops, and the overlap of corruption victims with Internet users is smaller than that of car aficionados. But it does introduce some perspective on what constitutes a “hot” online issue in China.

Corruption is a real issue here. The corruption website collapse story is neat enough to tie a Christmas bow around, and the foreign reports are all factually accurate, insofar as they essentially relay the Xinhua report. But what does this incident really say about Chinese society and the problem of corruption? There is a big difference between a site that was designed to support tens or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous visitors and was still overwhelmed by crushing demand, such as the Olympic ticketing site, and a small-potatoes site that fell over under moderate traffic or because it was designed, programmed or tested badly. Imagethief designed and developed e-commerce sites for many years and can assure readers that this a common problem. But “China anti-graft website collapses under public complaints”, to borrow one of the headlines above, is going to get many more people reading than, “China anti-graft website collapses because of poor programming”.

Fine. That’s the news business. Gotta get eyeballs on the page, and Imagethief, a subway commuter who reads on the way to the office, likes a punchy newspaper as much as the next guy. No harm in relaying a vacuous Xinhua story (sorry, Chris — not your fault), especially when it fits so neatly into an existing pigeonhole. It’s still “newsiness”, but if nothing else it can help keep our minds off of much more worrying things, like the ever dumber things American politicians are saying about China.

Rather than rehash old ground, I will point you to Cam MacMurchy’s latest post at Zhongnanhai, which, I think, does a very good job of answering the Global Times criticisms and analyzing the original story. It’s well worth a read.

I will, however, add a few other thoughts.

What is it about westerners who appear on television that attracts our particular ire? Anyone wanting to look deeper into this phenomenon need only consider Dashan. If there is a foreigner who elicits more widespread contempt from fellow western expatriates I’ve yet to encounter him (or her). One friend of mine attributed this to latent racism. It’s all very well to live and work in China, but to be seen acting ridiculous for the entertainment of the Chinese is taboo. My friend memorably referred to this as the “Dance, monkey!” syndrome.

Maher seems to have earned himself the same kind of contempt. Even Imagethief has written unkind things about him in past. But everyone who works in business in China is complicit with the Chinese government to some degree. We’re all doing our bit to prop up the State. An explicit part of my job is helping foreign companies to pander to the Chinese government. That’s why we’re always helping companies to talk about their “commitment to China”.

It’s true that anything having to do with propaganda or censorship touches a particularly raw nerve in people from liberal democracies (including Imagethief), but there are plenty of other westerners working in the Chinese media. Imagethief has met many bright people who work or have worked for Xinhua, China Radio International and the China Daily.  One of them, Xinhua polisher Chris O’brien, writes Beijing Newspeak, one of the best China blogs around. The now defunct Positive Solutions gave us an entertaining inside look at the China Daily for nearly two years. (Positive Solutions author Charlie has since gone on to more glamorous things, like many other western veterans of Chinese media.) Cam himself is a Chinese media veteran.

But both Chris and Charlie also excelled at taking their employers down a peg, and giving the rest of us amusing glimpses of the mechanisms driving state-owned English language media. I believe they were forgiven because they were seen as our spies inside; people who obviously didn’t buy into the product. And, of course, neither of them was in a publicly visible or bylined role.

And this is where Maher is different. He is very visible and in the LA Times piece he is unapologetic. I believe that’s what leads those of us who don’t know him personally to dismiss him. We observers of China’s state-owned media have perfected our airs of cynical dismissal. We know how it works. We know the agenda. We can read between the big and clumsily drawn lines. We’re always happy to ridicule its amateurism and censorship. Armed with our prejudices, when confronted with someone who publicly buys into the mission of China’s English language media we are forced to see them as either dupe or collaborator. And also, if you want to be incendiary, as race traitor. None of those labels allows much room for nuance or charity.

I don’t know Edwin Maher and I don’t think it is fair for me to judge him as an individual. On the other hand, I think it’s perfectly fair for me, or anyone else who watches CCTV9, to judge him as a media professional. Other than as a crude barometer of the Chinese government’s agenda I don’t have much time for CCTV9, or any of the state-run English language media. Their failure isn’t in presenting the Chinese government’s point of view, but in doing so spectacularly clumsily. Maher shouldn’t be criticized for helping the Chinese government to tell its story. If anything, he should be criticized for not helping them to tell it better.

See also:

Inside Chinese state TV (Informed Comment – H/T ESWN)

It all fit the model of the crusading online journalist/blogger quite nicely. Fame, fortune and –who knows?– perhaps even hot chicks beckoned. Then Zola decided he was going to take a crack at Google, and his fortunes took a turn for the worse.

In what seems to be a move taken from the Michael Moore playbook, Zola showed up at Google’s Haidian R&D office in Beijing armed with a video camera and confronted a security guard and then a receptionist about a customer service problem. The gist of his complaint appears to be that he was victimized by click fraud and then, in resolving that, shortchanged about seventy bucks he claims he was owed by Google. Neither the bemused security guard nor the Google receptionist was much help. The security guard palmed Zola off onto the receptionist (possibly the best move he made that week) and the receptionist alternated between futile attempts to steer Zola into Google’s normal online customer service channels and sullen silence.

Zola posted a ten-minute video of the confrontation on YouKu, which Bingfeng kindly posted a link to. It’s in Chinese, but a rough English transcript can be found on Reading China.

If Zola was expecting to be lauded for putting a burr up Google’s ass, he was, as we used to say in college, on crack (I was going to say “in high school” but I went to high school before the crack epidemic). He was instead pretty ruthlessly savaged in comments to his blog and on the YouKu video. The situation appears to have been aggravated by a bout of petulance over lack of public appreciation for his efforts in the Xiamen PX incident and an admirably honest but image- tarnishing confession that, really, he’s just in it to get famous.

China blogger and commenter-at-large Feng37 was helpful enough to send me a rough translation he did of some of the harsh criticism being launched in Zola’s direction. Here are three consecutive beauties in Chinese and English from Zola’s Bullog blog:

4 支持
[匿名] 火星 @ 2007-6-19 16:24:49
你直言不讳求名求钱，足够坦诚。但你动机如此纯粹，作为公民记者，不免让人对你的职业操守和诚信额度担心。

you’re straight up about wanting fame and money, that’s honest enough. But if your motives are so pure, as a citizen reporter, people can’t help worry about your professionalism, personal integrity and honesty.

[匿名] emlary @ 2007-6-19 23:08:47
网上那么多骂你的人，看来你离出名不远了，不知道你对客服是怎么理解的，不过看来在你之前已经有很多人去过google公司了，对于一点小事就睚眦必报，你觉得真的有这个必要吗？
So many people cursing you out on the internet, it looks as though you’re not too far away from getting famous. I don’t know what your understanding of customer service is, but it looks as though many people have been to Google before you…do you really think it’s necessary to get revenge and report on something to small and irrelevant?

[匿名] 给你一个警告 @ 2007-6-19 23:21:34
你太SB了，小子北京不是你想进就进的更不是你想出就出的
You stupid little cunt, Beijing isn’t a place you can just walk into when you feel like it and leave when you want.

And it gets worse. It’s hard being a celebrity, isn’t it?

As Feng37 pointed out, Bullog does not allow blog owners to delete comments (an interesting and debatably worthy policy). His new blog, http://www.alouz.com/, does allow that, and I am told he’s been making use of that function to purge the unfavorable comments.

In our communications about this issue, Feng37 asked me what advice “a PR 高手” (flattering, if perhaps a tad exaggerated) such as myself would give to Zola at this stage. I am sucker for this kind of challenge, so as much as I hate to be the john to Zola’s media whoring I am going make some suggestions. This is free advice and it’s worth every penny Zola has paid for it.

1) It’s not about you

You were in a good situation when you were covering the Chongqing nailhouse story. You had a sympathetic subject colorfully personified in Wu Ping, a relatively clear villain in the sinister developers, and a nicely unfolding drama that encapsulated a serious issue facing China. The Xiamen PX case had much the same drama and similar social relevance. Then you followed up these two immense dramas by going to Google to complain about seventy bucks they owe you. Spot the inconsistency.

By making yourself the focus of what was a comparatively trivial complaint, you also made yourself look petty and unsympathetic. People are generally not interested in sympathizing with the observer, but with the subject. If you wanted to complain about Google’s customer service, you should have found someone else trapped in their Kafkaesque customer service maze and gone to bat for that person. It’s OK for you be manipulative, that’s part of the art form, so pick someone as tragic and photogenic as you can find. A cancer-stricken orphan with a website, for instance. But you need to channel someone else’s misery, not your own. That enables you to remain comfortably heroic.

2) Pick your villains carefully and don’t humanize them any more than you have to

Google could make a good villain, heaven knows. In the space of three years they have gone from the plucky little startup everyone was rooting for to sprawling, secretive and vaguely sinister monolith that could be the next Microsoft assuming Microsoft knew every little thing about you right down to what kind of p*rn gets you off. But not everyone hates Google. They still have a lot of fans even here in China. Furthermore, it is possible to make a naturally unsympathetic entity (and Google has definitely become that) sympathetic by personifying it in a way that undermines your crusade. In this case, Google was personified by the receptionist who was clearly totally unable to resolve your situation no matter how much you harangued her. In the end I felt sorrier for her than I did for you (although this whole episode revealed some issues for Google China as well — more on that later). The lesson is to go after people who represent power or who are actual gatekeepers for power (like, gulp, their PR people). Next time pick on Kaifu Lee.

3) Grow a thick skin

As they say, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. If you’ve already confessed that your motive is fame then you better be prepared for the reality that just because people know who you are doesn’t necessarily mean they will like you. And the more you appear to be shamelessly self promoting, the more people will naturally lean toward disdain. Think Furong Jiejie, who never seemed to realize that the joke was on her and ended up being famous (briefly) and unintentionally tragic and embarassing. You don’t want your fame to be of the car-wreck variety.

But even if you are at your best, people will criticize you for any of a number of reasons. Suck it up, dude, and show some confidence. Soak up the criticism and, indeed, revel in it. The price of being a lone crusader is being lone crusader. Show some spine and treat the unbelievers as gnats unworthy of swatting. And remember your basic blogging etiquette: Don’t delete comments or posts if it can be avoided. Consider the fact that controversy on your websites will attract readers and that perhaps you should be cultivating it.

4) Never forget that the Internet is the lowest rung of celebrity

American radio star Howard Stern once said that radio was the lowest rung of the celebrity ladder (and as someone who used to work in radio, I empathize). Fortunately for him, the Internet has finally given him someone to look down upon. Audiences are fickle and celebrity is volatile and often short-lived. That’s especially true of Internet celebrity, which lends itself to transient, “flavor of the moment” fads and freakshows (see Furong Jiejie, above). Durable Internet celebrity is surpassingly rare. We’re all disposable on the Internet. Sucks, doesn’t it? In 1968 a smart man named Andy Warhol said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” He may have envisioning an Internet-powered world like the one we live in today. Or he may simply have been on dope. It was 1968, after all. But the essential truth of the statement remains. It is important, therefore, not to let Internet celebrity go to your head. Whatever else, don’t act like a movie star until you actually become one.

5) If you’re going to make it about you, consider the value of irony

OK, so maybe you’re going to ignore that first piece of advice and make it about you. There is a way it can be done. I note that the front page of your new website has a picture of you gazing into a mirror while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with–a picture of you. I desperately hope this is meant to be a gentle bit of self-satire. Because if it’s not self-satire then you really are headed for same lonely, post-Warholian purgatory currently inhabited by William Hung (look him up).

If you are willing to mock yourself, then you can ignore most of the rules above. But you then need to recognize that your mission has changed from citizen journalist to comic entertainer. Not everyone has the fortitude to make a career out of irony or self-ridicule, and my guess is that’s not what you want. So think it over carefully because this route will take 100 percent commitment, and it will be hard to mix with the kind of stories that got you notoriety in the first place.

Reflect upon Mr. Moore

I mentioned crusading film-maker Michael Moore on purpose. In crafting this advice, I considered quite a bit what makes Mr. Moore successful. He seems to be in the mold to which you aspire (metaphorically speaking — I don’t think you’ll ever be that big). Michael Moore is an utterly polarizing artist, but whether you love him or hate him he is undeniably a hit. Moore injects himself into his stories, but he is never the subject, only a conduit or engaged observer of someone else’s plight. He chooses his villains wisely (from an American perspective), knowing that his choices will generate controversy that will attract attention. And he is teflon-coated when it comes to criticism. Millions of people hate him. But millions also love him and he is world famous.

So that’s my advice. It is offered constructively. I think China benefits from having citizen journalists, and I encourage you to keep at it and get world famous. Don’t take the media-whore comment too seriously. You’ve already confessed. And, after all, many of us in the blogging and PR biz are media- whores ourselves. We can all whore together. That is what the Internet is all about, isn’t it?

That doesn’t sound like PR advice…

Readers may be thinking to themselves that the above is more advice on Zola’s craft than his PR. But for a media celebrity –even an aspiring one– the two are often related. The persona is the PR. The answer to Zola’s public perception problem doesn’t lie in anything he can say or write, but in how he defines his public persona. Looked at another way, we PR people are often accused of crafting slick, empty words to rescue people or companies from bad situations. Sometimes that’s true. But PR at its best is helping a client to find a genuine, constructive solution to a problem and then communicating the solution. This is especially true in crisis situations, and I think it’s safe to say that Zola has had something of a little crisis. Therefore I have proposed what I think is a solution

Bonus advice for Google China:

Despite the fact that Zola’s Google stunt went wrong, Google doesn’t get a free pass from Imagethief. A basic rule of PR is that in this day and age everyone is a public representative of your company. This is doubly true of a company like Google that is famous, controversial, and the subject of much discussion in China. That secretary was sitting in a Google lobby and wearing a Google T-shirt. How is it that she (and for that matter the security guard) wasn’t briefed on what to do when a journalist came to the front desk? And in the era of blogging and the Internet, anyone waving a camera around in the lobby, even if they are raising a customer service complaint, needs to be treated like a journalist. Especially by the world’s biggest Internet company, which happens to own a huge blogging engine and world’s biggest video-sharing website. Connect the dots, people.

In fact, a good policy might be to assume anyone who comes into the lobby is a journalist until conclusively proven otherwise.

So give the poor girl at the front desk some clear guidance on what to do in that situation, and a simple escalation path she can follow when she is dealing with someone with a camera. That doesn’t mean escalating to security or the police, unless the story you want going public is “How I was roughed up by Google”. Have someone on call who is media trained, savvy and knows enough about customer service to answer questions on the record. Who knows? You might find that these kinds of situations can be turned into PR opportunities.

Hey, nice shirt!

The power of language is especially apparent when words are emotionally charged. There is a reason why there are grinding political conflicts about when and how to apply the word “genocide”. The word demands action and commitment. The obtuse language of diplomacy has essentially developed to allow governments to escape commitment when it is inconvenient. You can debate and prevaricate about “internal displacement”, “human rights” and even “ethnic cleansing”. Once something is accepted in popular discourse as “genocide” the debate is over. Act or be complicit.

“Massacre” is a similarly charged word. The dictionary definition is: “The unnecessary, indiscriminate killing of a large number of human beings or animals, as in barbarous warfare or persecution or for revenge or plunder”. Indiscriminate killing. Barbarous. These are the things that “massacre” evokes. It is a word to describe a deed of evil.

That’s why Imagethief has followed with some interest the controversy generated by Ma Lik, Chairman of Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), one of Hong Kong’s political parties. The DAB is often described as “pro-Beijing”, and with his recent comment, Ma has left little doubt. Last Wednesday’s South China Morning Post* reported on Ma Lik’s statments on the front page, under the headline, “Fury at DAB chief’s Tiananmen tirade”. The lede said it all:

Hong Kong will not be ready for universal sufferage until around 2022 because the people lack national identity and many still believe there was a massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the leader of the main pro-Beijing party said yesterday.

***

[Ma] said one example to show Hong Kong society was not mature was people’s belief that pro-democracy advocates were “massacred” in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The quotation marks are theirs. It is the word “massacre” itself that is in contention, as became clear when the story got to the quotes:

“We should not say the Communist Party massacred people on June 4. I never said that nobody was killed, but it was not a massacre,” Mr. Ma told a media gathering less than three weeks before the 18th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on protesting students. “A massacre would mean the Communist Party intentionally killed people with machine guns indiscriminately.”

Indeed. See the definition above. In addition to Ma’s own comments, the interesting thing in the paragraph above is the use of the word “crackdown” by the newspaper to describe the incident. Newspapers are, of course, wary of making emotional judgments about events, and language like “massacre” does render judgment. That’s why when you Google Tiananmen + crackdown you get a lot of newspaper articles. “Crackdown” has become an accepted, non-judgmental way of defining what happened on that late spring day in 1989. Google Tiananmen + massacre and you get plenty of returns, but fewer newspaper pieces. (You get a lot of CNN online articles, however.)

For the sake of comparison, the dictionary defines “crackdown” as, “the severe or stern enforcement of regulations, laws, etc., as to root out abuses or correct a problem” or, slightly more forcefully, as, “an act or example of forceful regulation, repression, or restraint”. So we get as far as repression.

Massacre or crackdown? You decide.

I wasn’t there, but I’ll inject something judgmental into this piece. It’s part of journalist John Pomfret’s first-hand account of the events of that day from his excellent book, Chinese Lessons:

The soldiers began to fire live ammunition low into the crowd, hitting people in the stomach and legs. The night, balmy with a calm breeze, crackled with automatic gunfire. People fled in all directions. Some returned, rocks in hand. Armored personnel carriers rolled onto the bridge and began cutting the busses aside, cutting a path into the inner city.

I was petrified. Because I had never heard live gunfire before, it took me a few minutes to realize that I, too, could get shot. I was standing about one hundred feet north of the intersection. A crowd surrounded me and began yelling: “They are shooting us! They are shooting us! They are shooting the people!” I saw in their eyes a wild insistence. “You must report this to the world,” yelled one man. Then  the bullets zinged in our direction. I found what I took to be relative safety by lying flat on thw asphalt, pinne dup against a curb. Others ran. I remember thinking they must be crazy. As I lay on the ground with my cheek against the roadbed, I saw several demonstrators fall. The armored personnel carriers had done their work, ramming a channel through the burning busses. Then came the troop trucks, fifty of them rolling through the cumpled roadblock. Random gunfire killed a housekeeper on the fourteenth floor of one building. Another woman was wounded as she looked out of an eighth-floor window.

So is it a massacre? These are the kinds of things we foreigners have to go on when we assign words to events like what happened in Tiananmen Square or elsewhere in Beijing on that day. (In the passage above Pomfret is writing about Muxidi Bridge, to the west of Tiananmen. Pomfret himself uses “crackdown”.)

Citing the above won’t satisfy Ma Lik. Part of his complaint is that he feels that the events of 1989 are being defined by foreigners. Or so I interpret from this quote:

“The government should say what actually happened on June 4… It is not something that teachers can teach whatever they want about. Are saying [what happened] should be decided by gweilos?

The ellipsis and brackets are the Post’s.

In fact Ma Lik is doing two things. One is an extremely clumsy but otherwise garden-variety political language control maneuver. He is attempting to define the language used to describe the events of June 4th 1989 in order to serve a particular political agenda. He may also believe what he is saying whole-heartedly. Attempts to manipulate language are not necessarily cynical or dishonest, although they certainly can be.

But there is a second, and to my mind spookier, part of his statements that I have not seen remarked upon much in initial or follow-up coverage. It is hinted it at in that last quote. This is that Ma Lik wants not only to redefine the language that is used to describe the Tiananmen Square events, but that he wants to institutionalize that redefinition as a pre-requisite for universal suffrage in Hong Kong. According to the Post,

[Ma] said local students had not received proper “national education” since the handover and many still “care nothing” about the mainland.

And later,

Mr Ma, who is not known as an outspoken, hard-core leftist, said universal suffrage could not be introduced before the public adopted “heart-felt” patriotism.

In other words, “you’re not mature enough to be trusted with democracy”. This old saw, played to various melodies, is a favorite of undemocratic regimes across Asia.

Ma has climbed down a bit from his initial statements. A follow-up Post story (paywall) reports:

Mr Ma, who left for Guangzhou after speaking on the radio programme, said he was only trying to call for more rational and balanced views towards the incident. “I think what is most important is to find out the whole truth.”

He also said it was not his intention to ask the Hong Kong government to issue a definitive guideline to schools on how the crackdown should be taught. He only thought teachers should not “teach whatever they wanted”.

I don’t think any reasonable person would disagree with that. No one thinks teachers should have an unfettered reach to teach whatever they want. That’s why we have standards and curricula. In the US, school curricula, especially with regard to things like evolution, are the subject of vigorous, noisy debate. That is as it should be. The difference is that in the US no one who didn’t want to be labeled a crank would argue that a doctrinal viewpoint across society is a pre-requisite for a successful democracy.

That’s the thing about democracy; by it’s very nature it accepts that people will have different viewpoints, different beliefs and different opinions about important events and topics. They will use different language to describe the same thing. They will fight compete vigorously with each other to define the political environment in the language of their choosing, in order to reflect their beliefs and politics. That’s the contest of ideas that is fundamental to healthy  democracy. It is the essence of democracy.

If Ma wants to suggest that what happened in Tiananmen wasn’t a massacre that should be his right in a democracy or any society that allows freedom of speech. After all, you can’t have a true democracy without freedom of political speech, even if that sometimes yields ideas that are distasteful to some. To suggest, however, that homogeneous belief is a prerequisite for democracy is not only to utterly miss the point of democracy, it is also, sadly, to render the very idea irrelevant.

See also:

ESWN: Ma Lik’s comments on June 4th.

*Sorry, I don’t have a link for this article. The South China Morning Post not only has an all-consuming paywall, but it also has the single worst search engine and archiving system of any online newspaper I have ever dealt with.

The article makes many serious points:

“The world is not flat actually,” Liu Jiang, deputy editor-in-chief of Xinhua News Agency, said at the annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA), which was held over the weekend in the south China town of Boao.

“The world is in reality a slop [sic] on which information flows downward from developed countries to developing countries and regions,” Liu said.

“The World Is Flat” by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been frequently quoted to prove an alleged “magic power” of globalization by Bill Gates and other lecturers at the conference.

The book figures out ten driving forces to grind the world flat, in each of which media play an important role.

“Developed contrives, which have one seventh of the world population, have dominated two thirds of the total information flow,” Liu said. “However, globalization does not balance a horizontal world when it is grinding the world.”

“Why do Asian media always yield to Western culture?” Felix Soh, deputy editor-in-chief of The Straits Times headquartered in Singapore, questioned in his speech at the sub-forum discussing globalization and the media.

Imagethief has lived in Asia for over a decade and is a fan of Asia and things Asian. So he will try to address Mr. Soh’s question as delicately and constructively as possible.

It’s because on average Asian media suck. Especially news media.

Now this is not an entirely categorical statement. There are fine Asian newspapers and magazines, and, heaven knows, gifted Asian filmmakers and writers. But in general –and I am truly sorry for purely selfish reasons that this is the case– Asian commercial media is a desperate wasteland that teeters perpetually on the precarious knife-edge of irredeemability.

Mr. Soh himself heads up one of the blazing test cases for the failed potential of Asian media. Imagethief needs to tread carefully here because he is really good friends with several Straits Times journalists, and they are hardworking, smart, talented people. But friends are honest with each other, so here it is: the Straits Times took the last train to dullsville and fell asleep in its seat and missed the stop. I know. I subscribed for years.

The tragedy of this –the great, majestic, swooping tragedy– is that if any country was going to produce a credible pan-Asian newspaper it would be Singapore. It’s in the right place, it’s got the right people, and it speaks the right languages. It really is a regional hub. But it will never happen.

I blame government. Governments, by and large, should not involve themselves in media. But Asia’s governments cannot, for the life of them, keep their grubby mitts off the media. And damned if they don’t have a near mystical talent for boiling the life out of it.

I realize you can argue both aspects of the government involvement equation. The government-run chartered [see note below -WM] BBC, for its troubles, is one of the world’s great news gathering organizations. Too little government supervision of media and you get dangerously irresponsible or corrupt media.

But too much government involvement and you get soul-destroying headlines like…well, just for fun, let’s see what the top story on the Straits Times website is right now:

Need for S’pore to focus on sustainable construction: Grace Fu

THERE is a scope to reduce the stockpile release price for granite from May onwards, Minister of State for National Development Grace Fu said.

Gadzooks! And for good measure here’s the number two headline:

Extraordinary govt, talent keep S’pore ahead, says MM (MM= Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew)

Good gosh, two government headlines in a row. And this is typical. Back in Singapore we used to joke about what the above-the-fold government headline of the day would be.

Arguably, this is what is important to Singaporeans (although this kind of stuff drives my Singaporean wife up the wall, but she married me so she’s probably deranged). And I realize it’s unfair to dump so much on the Straits Times. But if the editor is going to ask rhetorical questions about the subservience of Asian media, perhaps he should look close to home for the answer.

This story is rewritten across the region. As long as Asian governments manage their news, censor their films, and interfere explicitly in culture then their newspapers will be treated as propaganda, their most talented artists will flee overseas and their people will wolf-down tawdry but lively foreign culture.

So my recommendation for the governments of Asia is this: if you want a louder voice in the world, if you’re tired of being walked all over by imperialist western media, if you think you are being misrepresented on the global stage, then back the hell off. Set your own media free. It will probably rise to the challenge, and, I suspect, do it better without you breathing over its shoulder.

But that’s a pipe dream. Here’s the end of that article:

High level forums and meetings have been raised by media groups from China and members of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). An agreement of cooperation on communication signed by members of the Non-aligned Movement at Kuala Lumpur in 2005 has shown the developing countries’ strong willing to speak louder in the world.

Delegates of Asian media attending the BFA conference reached the consensus that Asian media should shoulder a responsibility for broadcasting “a harmonious Asia” with “a harmonious Asian image” and provide a value of “harmonious region” to tell the world a real Asia.

A “harmonious Asia”? Oh dear. Pass me the Financial Times.

Note: I do give a tip of the hat to Singapore’s Chinese language daily, Lianhe Zaobao, which is popular in China.

Update: Charlie (in comments below) [comments no longer available - WM] and another reader (by e-mail) have pointed out the important distinction between publicly funded media, such as BBC or NPR in the US, and state-managed media. I should have made that distinction clearer in the text. The BBC is, thus, probably used incorrectly as a positive example above. Unfortunately that kind of bottoms out the list of exceptions to the government involvement = bad rule.

CHINA’S Communist Party propaganda department has launched a points-based penalty system to try to rein in the increasingly muck-raking print media, a Hong Kong newspaper reported today.

Media outlets will be allocated a dozen points that the propaganda department and the government media regulator can deduct one, three, six or all 12 at a time, the newspaper quoted unnamed sources as saying.

It was not clear how the severity of a perceived infringement would be judged, but penalties would range from warnings and dismissals to closure of the publication, it said.

***

“The new system is a clear message that the top leadership wants a peaceful social environment ahead of the 17th Party Congress and next year’s Olympic games,” the newspaper quoted a senior state media executive as saying.

The media point system was similar to China’s driver license point system whereby deducted for moving violations.

And, in fact, similar to systems used for penalizing motorists all over the world. This begs the question, for the first offence can a media organization send its staff to the Propaganda Ministry’s comedy media school and have the points restored, like going to comedy traffic school for a first offense in the US? After all, the government here has a tradition of political re-education. Why not work a few laughs in along the way?

Sure, right now you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t think the propaganda ministry is a humorous organization. But with a little work it could be. For instance, a favorite disciplinary tool here is the “self-criticism”. Anyone who pays attention to comedy knows that self-criticism is at the heart of much comedy. It’s Woody Allen’s entire oeuvre, after all. Could it be that hard to work comedy into other aspects of media discipline? I don’t think so.

Join me now as we look in on the Ministry’s comedy re-education school. An unnamed media organization has been slapped with three demerit points for unauthorized portrayal of a pig during the Chinese New Year Festivities, in contravention of recently announced regulations:

Cadre: Good evening, comrades. I am Mr. Wei and I will be conducting your political re-education today.

Editors and journalists: Good evening comrade Wei.

Cadre: You know, it’s great to see you all here today. I hear you got sent up for showing an advertisement with a pig in it during New Year. Honestly, muslims, who can figger ‘em out? You know they don’t eat pork? They don’t eat pork! How crazy is that? Say, that reminds me of a joke. A man was walking by a village when he saw a pig with a wooden leg. Not quite sure of what he was seeing, he went up to the house and knocked on the door. A peasant answered the door and the man said, “I was walking by and saw a pig with a wooden leg and I just had to find out why!”

“Well” the farmer answered,”that is a really special pig. Our house was on fire and that pig dragged my whole family out and saved our lives.”

“But why the wooden leg?” asked the man.

“Well,” the farmer replied,”a pig that special you wouldn’t eat all at once!”

Uproarious laughter.

Cadre: Yeah, the great thing about Hanification of the west is that you’ll finally be able to get a decent pork bun in Kashgar.

Chuckles.

Cadre: So how do you think the ministry found out about your pig advertisement?

Editor: They read our newspaper?

Cadre: Nah, somebody squealed! (Rimshot)

Laughter.

Cadre: Honestly, it’s not really your fault. The party believes that religion is the opiate of the masses. It just makes people crazy. (Twiddles index finger at temple.) Say, that reminds me of another joke. A Hindu, a rabbi and a capitalist are driving through the nongcun when their car breaks down. Fortunately they find a farmhouse nearby. The peasant tells them that he has only space for two more people to sleep inside the house. They are welcome to it, but one of them will have to sleep in the shed outside.

Well, after much discussion, the Hindu volunteers to go to the shed. A few moments later there’s a knock on the house door. It’s the Hindu. He explains that there is a cow in the shed, and cows are sacred to Hindus and he can’t possibly sleep in the barn with a sacred cow.

Annoyed, the rabbi volunteers to go sleep in the shed. A few moments later, a knock on the door. The rabbi explains that there’s a pig in the shed and that he, being orthodox, can’t spend the night in the shed with a pig.

So the capitalist says that he will go to the shed. A few minutes later there’s a knock on the door. It’s the cow and the pig!

Hearty laughter.

Cadre: But, crazy or not, the big Hu says we have to promote a harmonious society, right? So what do you think will happen if you publish another pig advertisement?

Journalist: We’ll lose another three demerit points?

Cadre: No, you’ll all be dragged out to the quarry and shot in the back of the head.

Stunned silence.

Cadre: Hey, just kidding.

Nervous laughter.

Cadre: You guys should have seen the looks on your faces. But seriously, folks, you’re a wonderful audience. Give yourselves a big hand.

Yes, it would be a laff riot.

The other difference is that the government has explicit power over the media agenda. Most of the time, self-censorship is the rule. However the propaganda ministry –中宣部– also sends out guidance on sensitive issues to major media. Editors who want to keep their jobs are expected to toe the line. Occasionally an acute issue will motivate a directive to halt coverage of a topic, as when media were directed to layoff the Foxconn-Apple scandal of last year. (Recently this has led to proscribed topics sloshing over into journalists’ and editors’ blogs, but that’s a topic for ESWN.)

We were reminded of the realities of government management of the media agenda recently, shortly after arranging an interview between one of our MNC clients and a Chinese business magazine. The magazine in question had requested the interview, with an eye on exploring our client’s business and investments in China. The discussion was vigorous but reasonably balanced and we were expecting a decent article as a result, with publication planned prior to Chinese New Year.

About two weeks after the interview, one of the editors involved called us and said the story would be “delayed”. Apparently the magazine had just received guidance from the Propaganda Ministry to be more “sensitive” in publishing stories that involved foreign investment, particularly around certain industries or well-known Chinese brands. We had not, at first blush, considered the story we were developing to be particularly risky or sensitive. But the journalists and editors at the magazine were, as you would expect, taking the ministerial guidance extremely seriously. So we had to wait, and so did our client.

But clients who make busy senior (foreign) executives available expect explanations about these kinds of things. “Hey, dude, it’s China,” doesn’t really cut it, so we did a little poking around. The back-story is illustrative of one of the challenges of the PR biz in China.

Anyone who follows current affairs in China will know that these are delicate times for discussing the topic of foreign investment. Questions are being raised about the quality of foreign investment and the intent behind it. Early last November the 11th Five Year Plan was published. It put a great deal of emphasis on the quality of foreign investment. In this English Xinhua article about the plan, the money graf –as far as we were concerned– is the very last one:

In response to the rising concern over foreign acquisitions of leading Chinese firms in critical sectors, the document says China will speed up legislation and step up the supervision of sensitive acquisitions and takeovers to ensure critical industries and enterprises remain under Chinese control.

Shortly thereafter, it seems the initial guidance to treat reporting around this topic sensitively was passed on to at least some Chinese media. The publication we were dealing with was government-linked, and had little wiggle-room as far as interpreting this directive to be “sensitive”. Unfortunately, apparently, they had somehow missed the memo and in their previous issue published an article that had raised eyebrows upstairs. This had resulted in a ministerial reminder to toe the line, which descended, Rumsfeldian snowflake fashion, into the in-boxes of the editors of the magazine we were working with the day before they called to tell us that they had to postpone.

My initial response when the Chinese media-relations guru on my team told me that the magazine had to postpone the story because of a government directive was to assume they were giving me a polite brush-off. Similar, perhaps, to what you might get if a Western editor didn’t like the story a journalist had put together on your client, and the journalist in question wanted to tell you something more polite than, “The editor thinks your interview was crap on a stick.”

“Are they yanking our chain?” was the first question I asked her. Some of our other Chinese team members, including one of our government relations people, had the same first reaction, so it wasn’t just foreigner-itis. But after some research and phone calls turned up the story above I changed my opinion. At the very least, if it was an excuse, it was a damn well substantiated one with abundant face-saving for everyone. In which case, my face duly saved, I could sleep well at night.

The net result, however, is that our story went on the back burner, where it remains until the publication feels that it can once again broach the topic of foreign investment in certain industries, or hell freezes over (whichever comes first). And now I have one more piece of due-diligence to do when identifying Chinese media to work with in future.

Such is one of the many things that make PR in China such a rush.