A confession: we haven’t been playing fair.
This realization was brought on by the latest issue of Beijing Today, an English-language tabloid put out by the Beijing Youth Daily Group.
It’s like this: one of Danwei’s favorite type of post follows the “issue + reaction” rubric: we pull an item from the news and then follow it with commentary from columnists, bloggers, and forum posters. Formulaic, yes, but nothing that lots of other sites don’t do, too.
So naturally we don’t much mind when the Chinese media does the same thing. Take Beijing Today, for example – it runs its Debates section in precisely this manner (image at left).
Problem is, we haven’t been giving them much to work with. The article excerpted in BT, Dealing with cultural garbage, didn’t generate much of a response. Without the critical “reaction” section of the formula, what is an editor to do?
BT did the only thing it could: it took bits and pieces of op-eds by Xie Fuming, Xu Guangmu, and Luo Tianzhu (all translated in the Danwei post) attributed them to various invented names: “Mutt Hu”, “Betsy Ross”, “Dynahog”. Large-scale copying and renaming is a staple of start-up forums who need to pretend that discussion is hopping (see this for examples), but for BT, it’s more than that: they are trying to do “man-on-the-street” interviews when everyone’s out of town.
There is some small comfort in the fact that Danwei’s situation is not as bad as some other China blogs. ESWN, for example, is so deviod of useful information that BT was forced to credit it with a Xinhua report on sex ed, and since ESWN doesn’t allow comments, reader reactions were poached from Times Online.
Nevertheless, discussion on Danwei is still pretty far removed from the the breadth of commentary on, say, Granite Studio, whose comments section was attached to a bricolage of GS, Danwei, and state media reports on the Christmas debate. Though in another issue, a Granite Studio article was credited to Global Voices Online, and the comments were attributed to “Glenn” (actually GS, with “Mothers are always great!” tacked on), CLB (also GS), “Homer” (GS again), “Bailey Squier” (yep), “ShadowWalker” (…), and Lao Lu (a genuine quotation!).
We have a serious problem here. And when I say “we,” I mean “you,” the Danwei reader. Shared information is the order of the day, but you haven’t been holding up your end. Web 2.0 is interactive, give-and-take; there’s been a lot of taking going on, and it’s time to give back. Beijing Today and all of the other windows on China can’t invent good journalist practices ex nihilo, and you have it in your power to provide them with the raw materials.
So step to it. We want to see a full spectrum of viewpoints represented: boosterism, paranoia, guarded optimism, hand-wringing, and crackpot lunacy – die-hard reds and rabid anti-commies both. Surely this isn’t too much to ask: the future of English-language Chinese media is in your hands.