By Yunting "Ivan" Zhai
Reporter, South China Morning Post
Guangzhou, China
Hosted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The first time I walked into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's building on Tucker Boulevard on March 31, 2008, it was cold, cloudy, and rainy outside. Standing in the huge, warm newsroom on the 5th floor, it was a little surprising to see some colleagues packing their stuff. Brown boxes were everywhere.

“Everyone in the newsroom is going to be moved,” my first-day mentor Elie Garner, a young photographer, told me. She said the online section would be moved from the corner, where it had been for almost a decade, to the center of the newsroom.

Two or three months later, I realized what “newsroom reorganization” really meant to our American friends. And I realized the whole newspaper industry for a while had been also in the weather of cold, cloud and rain, which was just exactly like the day I moved in.

I had set “learning how U.S. newsrooms merge their online and print sections” as one of my goals in the AFPF application letter as early as in 2006. In my mind at that time, newsrooms were trying to embrace the new technology.

But after landing in the United States, meeting McClatchy editors in DC, and witnessing how the Post-Dispatch confronted the challenge of the web, I understand how significantly the industry is being re-shaped by the new technology, or the NEW MEDIA: more and more audiences prefer to read online and cancel newspaper subscriptions; and the online classified advertising companies are squeezing newspapers revenue by providing FREE ads service.

I only knew a little about online journalism before. The moving of the online section was an important sign that increased my curiosity about the stories behind the shifting.

How does the Post-Dispatch operate new working flow? How do online and print sections cooperate?

How many people work for online section? What are their responsibilities? What tools do they use?

What is the cost of recruiting people for the online and reorganizing the newsroom?

Most important, how soon will this happen to my newsroom or other Chinese newspapers?

It's good to have the right questions, but how to find the answers? Lucky enough, I had a chance to attend a multimedia conference organized by the Mid-America Press Institute (MPI) in mid-April, the third week I was in town, and it was the perfect start.

During the three-day conference, dozens of speakers from different American newsrooms shared their first hand experiences of setting up and operating their multimedia or online teams. (Surprisingly, most of them just started less than two years ago!) And they also introduced all kinds of new concepts and tools in the presentations, which included:

Post First; Continuous News, 24-hour “Press”, and “early team”;

Social Networking, Twitter, Digg and Del.icio.us;

Multimedia, video, and mapping;etc.

First Half: Practicing Citizen Journalism skills

After the MPI Conference, I detailed my online journalism research plan like this: First (from the micro-angle), find some NEW MEDIA tools, practice, and understand the online audiences. Second (from the macro-angle), focus on the industry trend, understand the business model.

Then I talked with Post-Dispatch's social network editor Kurt Greenbaum, who is responsible for the newspaper's blog operation, discussing the possibility of setting up my blog at newspaper's website and how to target online audiences. After the meeting, I decided to “reorganize” my two blogs instead of creating a new one because:

1. The blog for Post-Dispatch will exist probably just a couple of months. Then I will lose the audiences and have to deal with my Chinese audiences any way.
2. To attract local audiences is not an easy job. It will take lots of energy to find their taste and I might not have time to do that.

Meanwhile, I also read some popular U.S. blogs and tried to shadow them. I found that to the online audiences, the most important thing is what we write and how often we write but not on which website you write. It does not matter whether you write on a U.S. newspaper's blog or you write on a Chinese blog; and a Politico.com writer might attract more readers than a Washington Post blogger.

Another valuable experience I gained during the “blogs reorganization” was that we must follow the Big Event and write as much as we can to cover that. When something big happens, everybody intends to spend more time online.

For example, I provided all kinds of Chinese and English information during the Sichuan earthquake in early May. I wrote comments and pasted other columnists' comments, I had breaking news and long investigative stories, I also used vivid, tearful pix, video and provided relevant links. I chose my content carefully, which only focused on individuals' grief and local officials' abuse of power. When the mainstream media was controlled by authorities and had no space to question or criticize the officials, people like to find such information from bulletin boards or blogs.

All methods helped spread the truth and attracted the traffic. For about a month, the average page view of my Chinese blog increased from less than 100 to more than 1,500 per day. But it requires a lot of work: to earn your credit or even become the reliable information source online, you need to focus your topic and keep writing and writing, probably everyday.

Not like the political U.S. blogs most of which provide analysis, I first consider myself as a “specific information provider” but not a columnist. My simple goal is to express the news to more readers as fast as I can. I might not have time to offer original thoughts or find original news, but at least I can help some people know the information before it is restricted.

To the U.S. journalists who have been following the free press standard for more than one century, internet is probably first a threat then a new “friend”. But to Chinese journalists, internet, especially those Citizen Journalism and Social Networking tools such as blog, Twitter, and Facebook, plays or will play a key role in breaking though the information restriction and bringing about greater press freedom. Facing the cyber world where people can freely exchange information for at least a few hours, propaganda authorities are losing their control.

Here are some ways to share my experiences with local journalist friends when I am back in Guangzhou:

1. Contribute more analysis articles on new media on my blog, develop myself to be an expert in the field.
2. Invite local journalists to a luncheon and pass tipsheets about the useful resources. Chinese like to do business during meal, which makes them feel relaxed and close.
3. We already have a panel about “new media” every Wednesday night at one journalist friend's bar. I will discuss with my friend about the schedule for a series of panels based on what I have learned in the United States.

Second Half: Understanding the industry trend

The Investigative Reporters and Editors annual convention in Miami, and 10-day training program in Poynter in June were fantastic. The timing was perfect because I was just about to shift my focus from personal skills practicing to the industry research. To those who are interested in new media but do not know how to start, I strongly recommend Poynter's “New Media Timeline” (http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=75953&sid=26#series).

As a history fan, I always consider that “Looking Backward” is as important as “Looking Forward” especially when nobody in the industry knows what tomorrow will really look like. After coming back from St. Petersburg, I read, downloaded, copied and printed out the documents mentioned by the “Timeline”, which not only tells us the significant events relevant to new media happened in both IT and newspaper industry since 1969, but also provides us tons of links. The more I found from the past, the more I know where I am and what I am going to do in the future.

Firstly, US media was aware of the new media as early as the mid-1990's. In his 1997 article, Jone V. Pavlik, then executive director of The Center for New Media at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, already pointed out “New media represent the future.” By 2000, “more than 1,200 North American daily newspapers have launched online services.” It seems that the industry had been trying to adjust itself to the new technology and some of them really did a good job.

Secondly, I have to say that when newspapers still had healthy financial condition ten years ago, they paid less attention to the FREE online classified ads. It's just like when they were thinking about how to deal with their audiences' new reading habits, somebody “attacked” them from the back. I assumed that when Craigslist launched its website in 1995 and accelerated the promotion in early 2000's, some newsrooms might also think about the model of “FREE classified ads”. But since it still created 30% to 50% total revenue for newspapers at that time, how could publishers and editors decide to offer the service for FREE?

(My newspaper, the South China Morning Post, has a long history of enjoying great revenue from its printed classified ads. It also provides online classified ads service nowadays though I'm not sure whether it is free or not. Maybe staying far away from the LA headquarters of Craigslist's is good luck. But I'm still worried thatwhat happened here might occur in Hong Kong soon -- I already found thousands of Hong Kong classified ads, such as property renting and cars selling, on Craigslist.)

Thirdly, according to the Timeline, the change in the industry was slow, eventual, and even unnoticeable. But once it occurred, you can't make a U-turn. When the big newspapers first felt the threat, they still consider some local major newspapers could maintain their advantages and that was why the Tribune Group bought Knight Ridder a couple of years ago. They thought the newspapers they bought were all leaders in local market with stable position. But the fact is, when the economy is down nationwide and Craigslist expands from coast to coast no one can be exceptional.

Since mid-July, I have interviewed Post-Dispatch's managing editor Pam Maples and the main editors of the online section. They told me how the newspaper had been reshaped in the past few years, what kind of difficulties they had and what exactly their responsibilities were. It is no doubt a good case study of “newsroom reorganization” and I hope to share it with my editors and colleagues when going back to Hong Kong as well as the brief history of Craigslist.

Also, I will try to share the information with some senior editors of Chinese newspapers. Such as Ms. Jiang Yiping, the deputy editor and a board member of the South News Group, one of leading pro-Democracy news organizations in China. I will try to find the opportunity to meet her when going back.

Fourthly, the Timeline provides me so many valuable resources, articles, statistics, websites and blogs, all focused on new media thoughts, industry trends, and the multimedia tools. I bookmarked them and saved them on my blog, by which all my readers can share the information even though I am still in the Unites States. The AFPF fellowship is only five and a half months, but with the resources I saved, the professional training will last as long as I want.

Finally, visiting the Poynter and the IRE's offices and websites gave me a strong motivation of doing some journalism training in Guangzhou or Hong Kong. Maybe it is because I have been a researcher for both SCMP and the Far & Wide Journal between 2003 to 2007, maybe it is because I had been doing hundreds of presentation for a Canadian private school for four years before I became a reporter, I always enjoy researching and presenting the results. Some training I might do in China are:

1. Launch seminars for journalism department students at Sun Yat-sen University, (SYSU) the best university in south China and one of the best in the country;
2. Organize a small group of SYSU students focusing on new media. I can provide them the resources, suggest them to read some key articles and have discussions, and translate and publish some articles online or by print.
3. I will contact Rebecca MacKinnon, the assistant professor of the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she teaches "new media". As far as I know, Rebecca is the only expert teaching "new media" in south China region. I would like to discuss with her about the training programs and keep in touch with her closely.
4. I'm also thinking about setting up a two-year scholarship in SYSU's journalism department by using a portion of my training allowance. The amount can be $200 per year, and the scholarship should be under the name of late Alfred Friendly. I guess it might be pretty difficult to get the permit from school administration. But if the fellowship wants to give it a try, I can check the possibility when going back.

Conclusion

When I was writing this report, the Gannett Co. announced its plan of eliminating 1,000 jobs. In the season of late summer, the whole newspaper industry looks like it is facing a long winter. Though journalists might have to suffer for another few years, I still believe what I had told Andrew Kipkemboi, one of our Kenyan fellows, in March when we were holding our red wine glass at McClatchy building:

"The (form of) newspaper might die, but journalists will survive (because people still need us to interview, to write and to report for them)". The only difference is that the channel on which we reach them might not be the old medium, but the NEW MEDIA.