While China's previous reluctance to share information may have been the legacy of years of secrecy, its reasons for withholding information this time may be about something else: business interests.
AllenInt.Journalism

Personal Web page:
Blog address:http://enjoyyourlife2007.home.services.spaces.live.com/default.aspx

Survey:

Career goal:

What do you want your job to be in 20 years?
Would it be so terrible not to have a slightest idea about that?
That seems too long a time to imagine.
In 5 years?
Well,I might work as a wire-news writer and work for radio
When you graduate?
2008
Are you interested in a career in journalism?
yes
How can this course help you reach your goals?
It's actually the first such course I have and I highly expect to write professionally either for print news or broadcast news.
Goals for this course:

Are you interested in producing for this course:

Podcasts? Yes
Video segments for YouTube? Yes
Newspaper or wire stories? Yes
A Blog? Yes
A regular news broadcast? Yes

Guests:

Would you like guest speakers from any particular professions?
Oh, yeah! Looking forward to it
Experience:

Please briefly describe any work you have done in the news media.
I have worked for the campus journal as a section editor for about half a year
How many television packages have you produced at this school? (Please include links if possible)
none
Do you have any production skills necessary to run a news broadcast? Please list.
That I expect to obtain gradually through this course,and of course through more practice
News Habits:

Which foreign and Chinese newscasts do you regularly watch?
BBC online service and Fox Newsnetwork,but the news video is not much available, mostly I get the news from web, in audio files
For Chinese newscast, I visit CCTV.com and http://english.cri.cn/
How familiar are you with foreign news broadcasts? Can you watch them at home? Over the Internet?
not very familiar, just have a skin-deep knowledge about them.
No,I can't watch them at home, not available
Please list some strengths and weaknesses of foreign news broadcasts compared to Chinese broadcasts.
Have no clue
What newspapers and news Web sites do you visit regularly?
CCTV.com, BBC.co.uk
Do you read the Washington Post and the New York Times? (Hint: You should)
Hardly

ASSIGNMENT TWO

Please paste the broadcast script you wrote in class on Sept. 10 based on the news wire report here.
(Converting wire news into TV news, 30s(+/-5s)
In Afghanistan, hundreds of South Korean Christians are ordered to leave the country. They are accused of seeking converts, which undermines the Islamic culture. The Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman says the Koreans entered the country with tourist visas but their activities showed they had a different agenda. But leader of the Koreans says they were giving training and medical care. Some Koreans have been forced out of the country.
ASSIGNMENT THREE
(A review of your respected freind's life and career on a TV show)
Now it’s time for our Weekly Personage. This week you will be introduced to a name that has sounded so familiar to your ears, also a name that I had gotten to befriend way years back. Yes, he’s Allen Zhu, former anchorman of the household program DAILY SERVICE on ABC. For the past seven long years, Mr. Zhu had been dedicating himself to catering for people’s daily needs for weather information and the latest entertaining, instructive, and need-to-know news stories. In his words “Daily Service, your guide through each new day”. This dedication and professionalism of his won himself due appreciation and respect; his witty language and amicable manners had also garnered around him a faithful audience. Now he left anchoring, we can only say he shall be remembered. By our close relationship in person I was revealed the reason why Mr. Zhu has decided to left anchoring, that he considers writing something in earnest. What genre? Of course we shall only be waiting to see.

ASSIGNMENT FOUR
Write three pitches that you and some classmates can actually produce with the time and resources available to you.

The audience will be English speaking You Tube viewers. Your pitch should offer them something they cannot see elsewhere. This means slice of life and human interest stories are OK, but try to come up with some hard issue pieces or stories related to breaking news as well. Foreigners love to hear about: The Olympics, counterfeit or dangerous products, the environment and global warming, martial arts, student trends, China's economy, interesting tourist destinations, and anything unusual or surprising. Think about a story you would like to hear about in another country, and try it here.

Also think about the big stories in the world, and look for a Chinese connection. Are there Iraqi students here? Does China have an Islamic insurgency? What do Chinese students think about the US presidential race? Who is in charge at the Palestinian Embassy here now that the Palestinians have split amid civil war?

Your pitch should include the names of the people you plan to interview, and the shots you plan to include.


Pitch 1:
China’s mobile phone users over 600 million

According to a report from the Ministry of Information Industry here in Beijing, China’s mobile phone users have exceeded 600 million by this June, that’s about one fifth of the world’s mobile phone holders. Officials from the ministry say China has not only witnessed an immense increase in the number of its mobile phone users, it also has the world’s most advanced wireless communication technologies.
(During this piece of news reporting, there could be an interview with one official from the ministry, and also an interview with a mobile phone user about when he or she first started using a mobile phone and whatever is interesting out of what the user says about the mobile phone experiences could appear on the broadcast)


Pitch 2:
If you have never seen for yourself the famous French Eiffel Tower, and by magic you are jerked to this place, a residential community in the capital city of Zhejiang Province on the coastline of China, and what follows will be a “wow” from you, because you have always dreamt of seeing the Eiffel Tower and now here it is. But wait, it’s only a simulating construction in proportion of 1:3 to the original one and now it’s still being built. The tower measures 108 meters high and weighs more than a thousand tons. The project is due to be finished by mid-October.
(There will surely be lots of pictures of this new Eiffel Tower, short interviews will be conducted with local people, asking them what they think of the idea, and of course there will also be opinions from the foreign friends working or studying in China)


Pitch 3:
Beef priced 916 RMB per kilo appears in Beijing

In a shopping mall on a busy financial street in Beijing, a newly opened underground super-market is selling beef at a sky-high price of 916 RMB per kilo, that’s more than 100 dollars. Shocking as it may, the working staff of the market says there are people buying it at all! The beef is unusually expensive because it is the meat of hybrid cattle and the meat indeed tastes more delicious. Before the meat could only be found in some of Beijing’s first-rate hotels.
(First there will be the shots of the mysterious beef, and then interviews with the market working staff and with the people who are actually buying it.)

ASSIGNMENT FIVE
Due Sat .Sept 22.

Please read the Washington Post pig disease story.


Please evaluate the story in terms of fairness and bias, focusing on how the story is sourced.

In other words, go through the story and determine the sources of all the reported facts. Please weigh how credible each source is. Then consider whether the facts she has assembled support the conclusions she draws. Has she assembled a solid foundation of facts, or is leaving out important information or points of view? You should also consider things you know about this situation that are not reported in the story.

If you think she has a bias, please support the claim.

I am going to compile your answers and send them to the writer, so please include any questions you want to ask her.

Please complete this by Saturday evening. I am not looking for length, but quality of ideas. Please dont spend more than an hour on this assignment.

Did this story give you any ideas for your own methods of reporting?

It’s a long news story with various sources. There are the pig farmers, the Chinese government, some journal editor, FAO Animal Officer and professors.

Of the quotes from the farmers, I think it’s credible and because it’s out of the reporter’s interviews and observation. It shows that the pig disease is really having some impacts on day-to-day life, most obviously the price hike and inflation that’s happening now in China.

But as to whether the disease is likely to become a global epidemic, I think the reporter has been taking a very critical and not-let-go attitude. She has been belaboring on the point that the Chinese government has been slow to share information with other countries. But in fact, it’s also in this very report that she wrote:
“Chinese officials have been tracking a mysterious illness in pigs since summer 2006, when more than 2 million pigs fell ill and 400,000 of them died. But it wasn't until this year that China was able to confirm that blue ear pig disease was the cause. Chinese officials said that they informed the public as soon as they knew.”
This shows that China is actually quite open about this disease. And besides, the reporter used some statistics about China’s annual pig production and also the number of pigs that die to disease each year.

“One area that animal disease experts say they want clarified is the numbers. According to the most recent Chinese government estimates, 68,000 pigs died from blue ear disease, 175,000 were slaughtered and an additional 1.5 million were vaccinated in the first eight months of this year. But in a typical year, China loses some 25 million pigs to disease. So if the official numbers were true, China would be having better-than-normal year for pigs, not a worse one.”
So if the analysis of the author is justified, that would only mean the Chinese government has been lying, period. It’s equivalent to accusing the government of a very blatant lie;
but if the author would only think and carry our more thorough investigations that pigs die not only of one disease, and there are various other reasons for their dying, and adding the serious blue-ear disease these two years, that would justify the government’s statistics as true. It’s I think where bias lies, a habitual dubiousness about China.

And this following abstract:
“But the public paper released by the Chinese scientists has had only a cursory peer review -- by editors of the paper, whose goal is to get information up faster and leave it online for public peer review -- and leaves many questions unanswered.”
What are the questions? It would be better to clarify and straighten them out to the readers, otherwise it only serves as a biased point of view in accusing China of isolating itself from other countries in information-sharing. Be clear and talk about the deal above board.