International Journalism

As Legacy News Outlets Retreat, Who Will Be There to Report on the World?

As Legacy News Outlets Retreat, Who Will Be There to Report on the World?

In October, as Ebola raged out of control and unsettled much of the world, I began making plans for a reporting trip to West Africa. I had covered a minor…
Chasing Paper with YanukovychLeaks

Chasing Paper with YanukovychLeaks

Command and Control

Command and Control

The Communist Party has long striven to control freedom of speech in China. Websites from around the world are blocked. Major social media cannot be accessed, and advanced software is…

Evan Osnos: The Challenges of Covering China

Evan Osnos, who covered China for eight years with the Chicago Tribune and The New Yorker, spoke about the difficulty of covering modern China in the 2013 Joe Alex Morris…
Technology, Transparency and Traditional Media

Technology, Transparency and Traditional Media

 As the profitability of traditional Chinese media plummets, journalists are increasingly beginning to transform themselves, with the acceptance of bribes for writing positive stories becoming more and more common among…
Eluding the "Ministry of Truth"

Eluding the “Ministry of Truth”

RELATED ARTICLESCommand and ControlBy Paul MooneyMoral HazardBy Yang XiaoInternet censorship in China is not simply matter of blocking foreign websites and deleting anything deemed harmful, nor is the state the…

“Stigma Rent-seeking” on China’s Internet

In October 2013, journalist Chen Yongzhou of the New Express Daily was detained and arrested after he reported alleged corruption at Zoomlion, a state-owned company. His paper’s front-page pleas for…
The Secret Life of Keywords

The Secret Life of Keywords

I became a journalist in 1979. Back in those days, two basic skills were required of any journalist: reporting and writing. Three decades later, in an era of dramatic technological…
Up Close and Personal

Up Close and Personal

Watch video of Osnos’s Morris Lecture, from which this essay was adapted In 1948, the Harvard Sinologist John King Fairbank wrote, “China is a journalist’s dream and a statistician’s nightmare.”…
Moral Hazard

Moral Hazard

In China, May has 35 days. All mention of June 4th, the day in 1989 on which the Tiananmen Square massacre took place, is forbidden. So Chinese journalists and bloggers…