中文新闻学 and the New York Times

In the great spirit of innovation and astonishing talent with which we hail the Missouri journalism program generally and the convergence emphasis area specifically, this week I want to highlight an ongoing convergence series I have followed this semester and found both unequivocally innovative and especially well-crafted. It may come as little surprise to the faculty that know me (and probably many of the students) that the series producing the story is the venerable New York Times.

Without further ado, here's the link.

There and hundreds of different aspects of this tremendous undertaking I could spend this blog post discussing, but for the sake of brevity, I want to focus on the aspect of the project that the strange characters in my title (or for some of you PC users who do not have the proper language tools installed, strange boxes) allude to. Namely, the choice of the Times to run Chinese language translations with all of the stories in this series. Accompanying each story in the "Choking on Growth" series is both a text and audio translation by what I believe are native speakers. Of course, I study Chinese, so this holds an immediate interest for me, but I think this innovation is noteworthy on another level as well: These hard news stories can be read by Chinese and thus influence the audience for whom the story's criticisms are most salient.

I will repeat the above point because it deserves emphasis: Unlike with most foreign news, those being written about or otherwise constituent to the issues addressed in these environmental exposes can actually read (or listen to in what sounds like excellent Chinese) what is being written about them in their vernacular. This breaks down barriers of what it means to cover "foreign" news. As the globe shrinks and the percentage of the population world-wide that is bi- or trilingual rises, the relevance of proximity as a news value seems to be evolving with it. We read about rapes in Dubai, pollution in China, and presidential elections in France. We hear about bombings in Iraq and the terrorist cells in Pakistan. And now, they can read what we write about them in their own language. When the constituency being covered can read and interact with the stories, they cease to become foreign news and become international news in a sense unfamiliar at least to me.

我喜欢这个新意。