International Journalism

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…
Commerce & Corruption

Commerce & Corruption

Technology development has been reshaping the media industry worldwide. In developed countries like the United States, traditional media companies felt the shock brought on by new technology several years ago.…
Under Pressure

Under Pressure

Two-thousand-and-three was a milestone year for investigative journalism in China. Some media organizations had been transformed from Communist Party propaganda tools into market-oriented news outlets. The Party line had weakened…