Assignment3 Part2 Article4

College Students Drowned to Save Two Kids
What We Have Learnt from This?

Three 19-year-old college students drowned when trying to save two kids near Baota Bay in Changsha around 3pm on 24^th October 2009.

More than ten students from Changjiang University were enjoying picnic on the river bank before two kids not far away suddenly fell into the Changjiang River. After realising most of them couldn't swim, the students decided to build a bridge by holding hands together so that they could reach the struggling kids in the water (see Picture 1). However, one of the students loosened his grip out of exhaustion after a short while and six students then fell into the river. The winter swimmers who reached there later managed to save the kids and three students, but three other students drowned in the end unfortunately.

Picture 1

Picture by CCTV

According to some reports, the three students drowned could have been saved by local fishers who refused to carry out any rescue action but chose to look on with folded arms. After ensuring the students were sure to be drowned, the fishers asked the other students and the college teachers (who arrived there later) for 36,000 RMB (around US$5,000) in total to salvage the bodies out of the river (see Picture 2). The desperate students and teachers had to went back home to collect or borrow money in order to take back the bodies of the three students. Eventually, the fishers agreed to return the bodies for 33,000 RMB (more than US$4,800) after the kneeling and begging from the students and teachers who couldn’t come out with more money.

Picture 2

Picture by Xianming, Liu

According to the further investigations carried out by the local government, the fishers who asked for money to salvage the bodies actually rely on such business to earn a living. The water around that bay is extremely dangerous for unprofessional swimmers, and many people have drowned over decades because of the strong undercurrent and eddy current in the area. Thus a small group of local fishers decided fishing dead bodies was a much more profitable business than fishing fish.

The incident has evoked strong criticism and intense debate within hinese society recently. Many people said the fishers’ inhuman behaviour was inexcusable and unforgivable. And it is definitely difficult to believe such horrible thing can happen in today’s civilised society. Moreover, some people said the college students shouldn’t try to save others if they didn’t know how to swim themselves.

But apart from feeling sorrow and angry, what should we actually learn from such tragedy? How do we make sure such thing won’t happen again in future?

First, there is a huge sign on the bank saying it’s a dangerous area and swimming is strictly prohibited (see Picture 3), then why the kids were still swimming there? Why the college students were having picnic so near to the water? Shouldn’t they be taught to follow the instructions on the sign? Also, why the kids were there by themselves without adults supervising them?

Picture 3

Picture by JZnews

Second, it’s very worrying that most students did not even know how to swim when the tragedy happened. Swimming is such a basic survival skill but usually it is not a compulsory subject in Chinese high schools. Instead, new students in high school or college are required to take basic military trainings. But aren’t swimming much more important than learning goose steps, particularly in cities near river and sea?

Third, all schools do not teach self-rescue or resuscitation measures in China. Consequently, students don’t have any clue about how to deal with emergencies. Chinese government should realise this as soon as possible, and make swimming and self-rescue compulsory subjects for kids.

Fourth, there was no river guard appointed by the local authority near the river bank. The local government didn’t even seem to have a protocol to deal with such cases. When emergency happens, people had no one to turn to. Probably this was exactly why the fishers could earn huge money from such a dreadful way—no one has been there to stop them at all.

Assignment3 Part2 Article3

iPhone Finally Welcomed by China, but Apple’s Not So Optimistic

Apple is busy preparing to enter the enormous Chinese market by introducing iPhone in cooperation with the second biggest Chinese telecom company—China Unicom. Although China’s approximately seven-hundred-million mobile user base seems like an inexhaustible profit source, many people doubt Apple will encounter the same predicament it faced when trying to launch iPhone in India.

In August 2008, Apple tried to sell iPhone to Indian mobile users but failed to create a market buzz. Some reports said journalists even outnumbered customers in iPhone’s launch parties in eight cities in India. There were two major factors that caused the lack-of-excitement situation. First, there was no effective marketing strategy. Second, the price was higher than what Indian users were willing to pay.

Apple definitely has learnt its lessen in India and will be more cautious with the Chinese market this time. First of all, it will abandon its traditional revenue-sharing model and earn money through wholesaling iPhones to China Unicom. Secondly, Apple and China Unicom will put more emphasis on marketing. According to Philip M. Nichols, an Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics from Wharton Business School, the hype had already started to build when he visited China in August. “You cannot go into Carrefour in Beijing right now without getting iPhone advertising right in your face. They are really advertising the heck out of it,” He said.

Another reason for China Unicom to stay optimistic about the potential sales is that there is immense demand for iPhone in China currently. More than one million iPhones are smuggled into the country and are sold in the black market every year. Clearly Chinese users have already shown great interest in using iPhone. If Apple does not make the same pricing mistake it made in India, the official introduction of iPhone by Apple and China Unicom can be exactly what Chinese users have been craving for.

Speaking of pricing, many Chinese media and users have been criticising China Unicom’s calling rate plans will just not work out. One of the major reasons is that most people who can actually afford the relatively expensive iPhone are using China Mobile—the biggest Chinese telecom company. China Unicom’s users are mostly younger people with lower allowance. Furthermore, users think the handsets introduced this time are crippled without WiFi, which was not allowed under Chinese governmental policy when Apple and China Unicom sealed the deal. Many Chinese users feel like they are “second-class users” to Apple when their iPhones are lack of such important function. On the contrary, iPhones sold in the black market not only keep WiFi, but are also more than a thousand yuans cheaper. For example, China Unicom is selling iPhone 3G 8GB for 4999 RMB (around US$732); while the black market price is only 3600 RMB (around US$527).

However, China Unicom claimed the subsidised price will be cheaper and even affordable for students if users sign a two-year subscription contract with the company. Users can receive an iPhone for free by choosing one of the two-year subscription agreements. The problem is to receive a free iPhone, a user has to pay 586 RMB (around US$86)every month, which is a far more expensive price than most ordinary users in China would like to pay.

Clearly it is unwise to assume iPhone can be popular everywhere. The journey of introducing iPhone to the biggest mobile market in the world will be rugged and rough and will require a lot more effort from Apple and China Unicom.

Here’s a news clip about the launch of iPhone in China.

Google to Reveal More About Chrome OS Tonight

After a quick peek at what Google Chrome OS may look like in July, users finally will receive more details about the new operating system after the Front End Engineering Open House hosted by Google tonight.

Google Chrome OS is a natural extension of Chrome browser，which Google released around one year ago. Chrome OS is a browser-central fast-booting computer operating system mainly designed for people who living on the web. Google promised that the new operating system can start up and take users online within a few seconds. Users can then surf the web or use services and applications online without wasting time and money to install drivers.

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” Google said in its official blog. With Chrome OS, users no longer “have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates.”

According to Charlie Sorrel, Google Chrome has five major advantages. I think three of them are particularly worth mentioning here.

• Cheaper cost

Google Chrome OS will be free. Because the system is based on Linux, so users don’t have to spend money on Microsoft licensing fee.

• Faster speed

Chrome OS can be run on low-powered Atom and ARM processors. All the applications and services online do not require much power from the netbook, hence the battery will be able to last longer.

• Good Compatibility

Users don’t need to worry about the compatibility between drivers and operating systems because they don’t even need to install drivers.

Google said Chrome OS initially will target at netbooks, but will eventually be used on PCs as well . “The netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010”, said Google’s official blog.

When doing research for this blog posts, I was certainly excited to know there will be a free clean fast operating system available. However, I realised accessing applications online will need high Internet speed and lots of Internet quota. Actually, in Australia, broadband is slower but more expensive compared with the US and Japan. Users will need to pay $99 dollars for only 20GB per month according to Optus’ Internet plan. But my friend used to tell me even 30GB per month is not enough for online video viewing if you are really into Youtube. If you have to share one Internet line with your family or housemates, fast broadband will seem even further away. So unless you are really willing to invest in your online experience, using netbook with Chrome OS won’t be such a cheap option here in Australia.

Assign3 Part1 Article2

China’s Internet Censorship Nightmare

Whenever Internet censorship is mentioned, the first country many people think of probably is China. Perhaps most Chinese people would feel mortified and helpless when it comes to the Great Firewall that is filtering everything online.
Four years ago, when western people talked about the strict Internet control in China, some Chinese would just shrug, because the situation was actually not as bad as western media exaggerated. Chinese users living in China mainland could still browse most of the foreign websites. Now, in 2009, the situation has completely changed: some Chinese popular literature websites have to close up regularly to avoid trouble; many websites either close up certain sections or invent some creative ways for users to register (so that it will be difficult for the Internet police to register); service providers have to stay alert all the time—once your users post something the government doesn’t like, you are dead! But even so, most users could still endure all mentioned above. The thing that really upset a huge number of people was that Google was asked to stop linking to all foreign websites—Chinese users cannot even see a snapshot of foreign web pages. At the era of web 2.0, when knowledge is supposed to be shared by the entire humankind, the Chinese government has deprived its people of the right of seeing the rest of the world.
It’s difficult to believe such thing happens in a society where around 300 million people are using the Internet. The question everyone would want to ask is why? The Chinese government said they have justifiable reasons. Chinese Central TV and related administrations accused Google of disseminating obscene information that are harmful to the harmonisation of the Chinese society. On Sina.com (the biggest Chinese news portal), 1256 people replied to an article saying Google is “fooling Chinese people and the government”, but only 40 feedbacks can be displayed—of course all the 40 feedbacks are supporting the argument of that article. Any one who has read the article would wonder if it was the same person—an Internet police perhaps—who wrote all those feedbacks.
Ordinary Internet users in China would definitely choose to enjoy the borderless information sharing. Who wants to be constantly constrained and monitored anyway? But unfortunately, the Chinese government choose not only to block the rest of the world out, but also to silence alternative views from its own people.
After the Nation Day on 1 October, the Chinese government promoted new filtering softwares to tighten its Internet control and most anti-filtering softwares became useless. Meanwhile, the US-based IT companies continue to release updated softwares like Freegate to allow users in China to breakthrough the Great Firewall. The technological war between the filtering and the anti-filtering softwares has risen to a higher level. However, when can the Chinese government realise strict internet censorship is driving its dream of building a harmonised society further and further away?

Assign3 Part1 Article1

I wrote these articles for China Digital Times, a bilingual service covering “China’s social and political transition and its emerging role in the world.” They publish news reports as well as opinion pieces. Some of their articles are translated from other Chinese news websites. The website is run by the Berkeley China Internet Project (BCIP) out of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

China Blocked Social Networking Websites


Picture by Xianyunyehe

When the whole world is talking about the benefits brought by social networking technologies, China decides these technologies are bad and subsequently blocks the access to Facebook and Twitter from China mainland. But what’s the big deal about these social networking sites? Does it hurt that much to let Chinese people networking a bit online?
According to Huanqiu Newspaper, the Tibet-independence and Xinjiang-independence supporters who ran the riots earlier this year used Facebook to connect with each other. And Twitter managed to disseminate news about riot in Xinjiang quicker than the Chinese national news services. The Chinese government believed they would lose the control of the situation if they lost the control of information. Then immediately after the riots in Xinjiang, many popular social networking sites were either blocked or closed down.
So, several Facebook groups and tweets contributed to the fact that all netizens living in China mainland are now deprived of the right of using Facebook and Twitter? When we think about it, we can neither blame those social networking sites nor those Tibet-and-Xinjiang-independence supporters—the former simply served as communication tool, and the latter simply used the tool. The real problem here is that the Chinese government adopted an extremely negative attitude towards social networking sites. And the ordinary Chinese netizens became the victims.
In the era of Web 2.0, social networking websites rely on mass-scale online activities. It’s cleverer for a government to fully embrace new online technologies rather than to deny them. First and foremost, the Internet technologies are impossible to be killed unless a government chooses to destruct all the telephone infrastructures. Second, many incidents in the past have proved that the government can generate positive public relations through social networking sites. Take the 2008 presidential contest between Obama and Hillary as example. Both Obama and Hillary had huge number of followers on Twitter, but what made Obama a winner was he was following hundreds of thousands people while Hillary was following no one. This is certainly not the only example of the effective utilisation of social networking for political purpose. The British government has also been clever enough to ask public servants to tweet regularly. If the Chinese government was able to use the same logic, people would probably receive information about the riots from the government first, not from those Xinjiang-independence supporters.
This sort of Internet control is like a vicious cycle. The more you try to control, the more you lose. Now the Chinese netizens are dissatisfied with the tightening censorship—more and more users will start to protest if the online blockage lasts longer. Furthermore, the internet censorship in China has done huge damage to the international image of the whole Chinese nation. The Chinese Internet filtering system is dubbed the “Great Firewall”, which probably is one of the worst humiliations that the Great Wall of China has ever had in thousands of years.

Apple and Woolworths’ Trademark Dispute

I just read this hilarious story about the trademark dispute between Apple and Woolworths. The author says Apple is actively suing any one who dares to use the fruit apple in its logo—even New York City can’t be exempted. According to the article, Hans Hulsbosch, the artist who designed the new logo, said

“Based on this logic, they [Apple] would have to take action against every fruit seller.”

The feedbacks to this article are even more hilarious. A reader replied Apple should sue God because there’s apple in the Bible.
There’s actually another side of the story. According to Nilay Patel, what Apple has been doing is simply a routine that many companies do as part of the trademark reviewing process. And Apple filed its notice of opposition half a year ago, but no one cared about it until Woolworths talked to The Age.
I think it's interesting that The Age, where the story originally came from, decided to frame the whole thing like a war.

Hachiko: A Dog’s Story

I saw the film Hachiko: A Dog’s Story recently and liked it a lot. So I’d like to recommend it to everyone who browses this blog.
The film is actually based on a real story happened in Japan. A faithful dog named Hachi would accompany his owner, a college professor, to the train station everyday in the morning, and greet him outside the station at night. Unfortunately one day the professor suddenly died of heart attack when he was teaching. However, the dog continued to wait for his owner outside the train station everyday for nearly ten years.
The story of Hachi is very well-known in Japan. Even today, there’s a bronze statue outside Shibuya train station in the city centre of Tokyo as a reminder of his loyalty and devotion.

Do We Heavily Rely on News Media to Make Sense of the World?

I have been reading a book called Where Underpants Come From and feel somewhat offended by the content. The writer wrote something like people don’t queue when buying subway tickets in Shanghai. I certainly don’t believe what the book depicted because I have the first-hand experience to prove the book wrong (I’m from China). However, when I think about it, I wonder what other people would think if they read the book. If they have never been to Shanghai, will they believe the book? Well, probably yes, because at that moment, that book perhaps is the medium they reply on to make sense of the city Shanghai.
The same applies not only to books, but to all media, particularly news media—through where we look at what’s going on around the world. As McLuhan mentioned, like villagers, we use television as a window to observe what’s going on outside on the streets. In modern society, the television shows us not only things happening on the streets nearby, but also things happening on the other side of the world. Modern technology makes distance disappear greatly. However, like Miller (1971) argued senses like pain, heat and smell are cut off from the audiences. How news stories are framed can strongly influence how people interpret the whole thing. Like what happened in KOSOVO war in 1999, NATO framed the war as a “zero casualty video-game”(Bens, ED, Hauttekeete,L & Lagast, H 2002). Military actions of NATO were presented as only targeting on certain locations like power plants, communication centres, and factories. Citizen casualty was greatly erased in the news. Government and PR people made it look like a “clean war” (Bens, ED, Hauttekeete,L & Lagast, H 2002).
The news media also influence us in some more subtle ways. Like the how media label enemies as “terrorists”. In some cases, such demonizing of enemies helps not only to justify actions from “our side”, but also reduce the audiences’ sympathy to “their side”. Examples could be KOSOVO war, Iraq war, and what’s going on in Tibet recently.
There are other influential media sectors as well. One example would be advertisements. In recent years, many ads appear in media as mutated forms. In print media, ads about PDA, mobile and other gadgets sometimes do not look like ads, but look very much like feature stories, which trick readers into reading the contents. Music videos, TV series, films and video games also indicate audiences what are the must-haves nowadays. I remember watching a Hong Kong TV show in which an old guy said he was using a mobile phone his son had discarded because of its lack of certain functions. But even with that used mobile phone, he could watch TV programs and live-cam with his son. I felt a bit miserable because I have been using a GSM mobile for years. But on second thought, I wouldn’t have felt miserable without watching that show. It was the show that told me everyone else is using a high-tech mobile. But if I look at people around me, that’s certainly not the truth.

Google launched Internet Stat

Google launched a statistic centre called “Google Internet Stat”, which brings together industrial facts and insights provided by many third-party recourses across various industries around the world.
This new statistic centre can analyse data online and provide results with “Twitter-sized snippets and factoids”.
Internet Stat covers five major areas including macro economic trends, technologies, consumer trends, media consumption, and media landscape. There are also some sub-categories under each major area.
Earlier, I tried to search “Facebook” on Internet Stat, and the result is like this: 5% of all time online is spent on Facebook. Comscore is credited as the source, but if we click the link, we will be directed to a news article on Guardian UK.
I think such search tool like Internet Stat is very convenient for researchers and students— I get the short versions of facts quickly and I can also trace back to the sources. However, Google Internet Stat does allow users to submit contents. Now the sources Google credits on the Internet Stat’s homepage look reliable. But how Google can ensure the liability of the sources in future? Will it become something like Wikipedia— useful but not trust-worthy?
Moreover, I’m not sure whether the sources are offering the stats free of charge to Google. Well, it definitely can be a good opportunity to gain more traffic because people will want to trace back to the sources. But to what extent will they want to offer free stats? And how Google can generate profits through this?

Internet helps to maintain friendships

Recently I read an article from a Chinese magazine saying the Internet is like a fridge that can help us to maintain our friendships for a very long time. Sometimes, when we stop talking to our cyber friends for a while, our friendships become “frozen”. But once we start talking again, everything would feel “fresh” again.

Two days ago, I talked to one of my friends whom I have known for around seven years. We have met in real life, but just for several times. I think we stopped chatting on MSN around two years ago. Since then, we keep each other on MSN friend list—never delete, and never double click. Two nights ago, she suddenly sent me a message saying my avatar looks pretty. Then we start chatting again and everything feels exactly the same.

So it came to me how wonderful the Internet is in this respect. In real world, sometimes my friends are just people passing by. But in cyber space, many of my friends are always there. Looking at the 200 contacts on my MSN friend list, many of them last longer than my friendships in real life. The Internet helps us to keep our friendships “frozen” and “fresh”. We never know how each other has grown old over the years; and our friendships can be evergreen online.

Assign 1 evaluation of three websites

This post will look at three current affair websites and evaluate the effectiveness of their site structure, story construction and writing techniques. These three current affair websites are Newmatilda, Fair and Propublica.

Newmatilda.com
Newmatilda is an Australian based independent journalism website specialised in “intelligent coverage of Australian politics, business, consumerism, civil society, international affairs, media and culture” (Newmatilda 2009). It provides insights and discussions that are not usually covered by Australian mainstream media.

Newmatilda has a very clean-cut homepage, with different sections neatly placed into well-organised grids. Right under the site’s logo on the top, the navigation tool contains simple links to “Recent Articles”, “Archive”, “About US”, “FAQ”, “Contribute” and “Contact”. These links are repeated at the bottom of the homepage again through text-links so that users with low Internet speed can download the links faster.

Moreover, search engine is conveniently located on the top as well as at the bottom. There are also links to different categories of topics down there so that users can browse the areas they are interested in without looking through the whole archive. It is also great that users do not need to scroll down much to see the whole homepage.

A distinctive advantage of Newmatilda is that the whole website can be further customised to users’ needs through simple steps of register or sign-in. This not only allows more interactions between users and websites, but also entrusts users more power to manipulate the website’s settings according to their own preferences.

The most recent feature articles are promoted on the homepage with pictures, headlines, kickers and standfirsts. The most important story has the headline with the biggest font size to grab users’ attention immediately. Most pictures are highly-contrasted in colours so that they can stand out from the white background of the grids.

The headlines are short and to-the-point, and contain the most important key words of the stories. Take their latest news piece as example, the headline is “There's Big Trouble Down At The Mill” with “CHINA” on top and a phrase “The arrest of Australian” below. These simple words give readers a very clear idea about what they can expect once they click the link and start to read the story (Bowles & Borden 2000).

On the story page of “There's Big Trouble Down At The Mill”, the bold-font standfirst is written in green-blue colour, which is different with the colour of the rest of the text. The standfirst effectively summarises the gist of the article. The story consists of 14 short paragraphs, and each paragraph is made up of two to four sentences (Smith 2003). Such story is not particularly long so readers will not feel overwhelmed by dense words when reading the story.

The keywords of this article such as “stern hu” and “Chinese steel industry” are highlighted as “Tags” under the picture on each story page. Users can access other related articles by clicking the tags they are interested in.

The in-text links of this particular story are all from outside sources including Xinhua News Agency, which is a very credible national news service of China. Authors of Newmatilda in general are not afraid to link to outside sources in their articles. The choices of outside sources are mainly plausible because most sites they link to are credible news services like ABC and New York Times. However, most articles on Newmatilda do not really use many in-text links.

Related stories are listed at the bottom of each story page. However, they are all linked to Newmatilda’s own articles only. It is recommendable that Newmatilda should have more external links to present users with different view points from other websites.

It is very convenient that users can click “Discuss this article” at the end of each story page to leave feedbacks. Such function encourages users’ comments and interactions.


Propublica.org
Propublica is a US based, non-profit news site specialised in investigative journalism. Many of its stories are co-published with mainstream media in the US.

Propublica in general looks more like a feature section from traditional newspaper. The homepage with bright backgrounds and dark-colour words gives people an impression of seriousness.

There is a “Sections” button right under their logo on top of their homepage. The “Sections” button is actually pull-down menu that links to seven major categories and six sub-categories of their archives. Such sort of menu not only helps to navigate readers, but also helps to save more limited page space (because websites cannot let user scroll too much).

There are also keywords like “Katrina Hospital”, “Bailout Guide”, and “Stimulus” on the top beside the Section button. So users looking for reports on popular topics can dive straight into the related articles conveniently. There is also a search engine located at the very top of the homepage.

Above their site banner, the page linking to “Steal Our Stories” tells users it is free to republish Propublica’s articles and pictures for free as long as people link back to Propublica. This greatly encourages people to share Propublica’s articles and also boosts up Propublica’s ranking on search engines.

Like Newmatilda, recent features are promoted on homepage with pictures, headlines, and leads. Headlines use dark-blue colour and bigger font size to stand out.

Most headlines of Propublica are very short and powerful. For example, in the “Ongoing investigation” section, the headlines are "War-Zone Workers Face Struggle for Health Benefits", "Energy Industry Uses Misleading Data", "Problem Nurses Stay on the Job as Patients Suffer". All these headline are written in Subject-Verb-Object” pattern to “keep structure simple so ideas are easy to digest” for the readers(Smith 2003).

In addition, Propublica use captions, headlines, leads very effectively to tell readers what to expect behind a link. For example, on Propublica’s homepage, the caption of the Memorial photo tells us what happened in the medical centre. Then the big-sized, colour-highlighted title "After Katrina: The Deadly Choices At Memorial" tells us the story is related to Hurricane Katrina. Even if some readers do not know about Katrina, there is a short explanation about the event under the headline. Readers can access the full story by clicking the picture, the headline and the link “Read the story” below the explanation.

Beside this feature article, there are also three other pictures with captions linking to other related stories that explore the Katrina incident from other angles. Readers can trace back to the major story page from any related story page by clicking the “See related story” link. There are also links with pictures and captions at the bottom of each story page that bring readers to other related pages.

The feature story “The Deadly Choices at Memorial” is five-page long, and there is no in-text links, highlighted keywords or bullet-pointed lists. Such sort of long plain text is quite the opposite of “making online articles short and skimmable” as proposed by Bowles and Borden (2000). However, given the complicated nature of investigative journalism, it is reasonable to assume readers will be willing to read the full story if it is well written.

Each paragraph of this feature contains one single idea and remains relatively short—around four sentences—so that readers will not be burdened to read long and dense paragraphs (Smith 2003). There are also subheadings and pictures within the text to break each page into smaller segments (Dube 2003).

On the right-side column of each page, there are multimedia files (pictures, illustrations, videos) to further explain the feature story. The “Interactive Timeline: Katrina and Its Aftermath” page allows readers to click on a flash graph to choose dates and read short briefs about what happened in time sequence. Each short brief was also accompanied by kickers, pictures, and captions. People can leave feedback by clicking “Comment” button at the end of each story.

There are links to related stories under the “Other Hurricane Katrina Coverage” heading. These related stories are all from Propublica itself. However, Propublica does link to other outside sources through in-text links in other articles. But most of those outside sources are American mainstream media.

Most of Propublica’s external links are in the “Breaking news on the web” section that directs readers to some latest stories online. Most links in this section guide readers to stories from American major mainstream publications such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Considering Propublica is now led by former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and former investigative editor of the New York Times, it is obvious that Propublica has deeper relationships and more cooperation with mainstream media compared with Newmatilda and Fair.


Fair.org
Fair is a US based progressive current affair website promoting structural reform in the journalism industry to deconstruct the monopoly of the transnational media conglomerates.

Fair’s homepage contains most of the necessities for a website, however, it dose not give users a particular impression. The entire website is text-dominated and does not contain many multimedia files as Newmatilda and Propublica do.

Fair has a powerful categorising system by which users can choose to browse articles by issue area, region or media outlet. However, users have to click “Issues & Archives” for the list of categories. Hiding the list of categories in some sub-sections does not give users a clear straight forward idea about where to find the information they want. Some people may just choose to give up and Google some other websites from where they can find information quicker. So it would be recommendable for Fair to place a pull-down menu like Propublica’s on their homepage.

Fair’s homepage lists the headlines and the first two paragraphs of their recent blog posts with keywords and in-text links highlighted in blue colour. Most of their blog posts are as short as three or four paragraphs. No matter which headline we choose on the homepage, we will be directed to a page showing all recent posts in full length. This page is particularly long and requires lots of scrolling. Only after we click a headline again on this page, we can see the individual page for a particular story. So it will be more convenient for readers if Fair links individual story page directly with the headlines appearing on their homepage.

The headlines on Fair’s homepage are not very well composed because many of them are not straight forward enough. For example, if we look at these headlines—“The Fabulously Unsurprising Lies of Glenn Beck”, “Corporate Media 'Default Position': 'War Must Go On'”, “Way Cleared for More 'Excessive Media Consolidation'”, and “WSJ 'Scumbag' Columnist Gets Predictably Slimy”, we would have little idea what the articles are about without reading the whole contents. The using of quotes, adjectives and metaphors makes the headlines sound a bit abstract.

Fair uses extensive in-text links to outside sources. These sources include a wide variety of websites. Keywords are listed as tags at the end of each story so that readers can further explore related articles.

Finally, Fair will definitely benefit from having more multimedia elements to make their web pages look more attractive. Recent posts should not be promoted with headlines and part of the articles but with headlines and leads (or kickers). Their headlines should use a more down-to-the-earth approach, which tells readers directly what to expect from the articles.

No Good Multi-tasker When It Comes to Media Activities

Recently, researchers from Stanford University found out that there’s no good multi-tasker when it comes to media activity. When we are using different media simultaneously, we are actually bad at concentrating and organising information. It’s like the more you try to do, the worse you can do.

I personally find it very true. Because I tend to watch TV dramas when I’m drawing, but when my friends try to discuss what happened in those dramas, I usually have little idea about what they are talking about. When I try to remember the plot, nothing really comes to me except the faces of the leading characters. The situation is the same with reading online for me. When I read things online, I have to mute the TV, otherwise, my brain will constantly try to decode the messages I hear from the TV. However, when I read from books—the traditional sort of books—I think sometimes I manage to ignore the noises around. Of course it depends on how interesting the book is.

This reminds me of a report saying nowadays many Britons watch TV only because they are surfing online at the same time. So if the researchers from Stanford University are right about people can’t multitask, it would be obvious people devote their attentions to the Internet, not the TV. No wonder TV stations have to worry about the effectiveness of advertisements since the prosperity of the Internet.

The same report also said instead of sitting on the sofa together, family members tend to do their individual things. Therefore, new technologies become a destructive force driving families apart. Although I’m not from UK—I’m from China—I find the report sadly true for my family. We have three laptops at home, and we do our own things quietly after dinner in different corners of our apartment: My dad usually read news online; my mom simply uses her laptop to play games; I spend hours reading online novels.

So what do you think? Have you successfully done different things simultaneously with different media? And do you think new technologies become destructive force for family unity?