There is one sure way for an individual journalist to make money online: lie through your teeth to an audience that is not interested in facts and welcomes these “alternative” facts as the new gospel: fake news is good news, if it suits you.

The controversial LibertyWritersNews site illustrates how websites can use Facebook to tap into a surging ideology

Two young former restaurant workers Paris Wade and Ben Goldman and their website LibertyWritersNews did just that by tapping into the Donald Trump momentum last year. The game plan was think of a headline, say, “Can’t trust Obama”; then make up a story very loosely on the facts; than conclude with “Down with globalists… if you love this country”; then wait for a few seconds for a response (from the base – white, working class woman, Midwestern) like, “you are the only one I trust to tell the truth”. See, easy.

The more successful bloggers usually feed into their own websites, have an active Facebook strategy and have been picked up by other websites for a fee.

At a time of continuing discussion over the role that hyperpartisan websites, fake news and social media play in the 2016 election, LibertyWritersNews illustrates how websites can use Facebook to tap into a surging ideology, quickly go from nothing to influencing millions of people and make big profits in the process. At its height, the website gained 300,000 Facebook followers in October alone.

This single-issue approach often works best with special interest groups and helps drive advertising and sponsorship. The more successful bloggers usually feed into their own websites, have an active Facebook strategy and have been picked up by other websites for a fee.

Facebook leads the way

News websites carefully maintain and feed their Facebook pages to bring in new readers as well as maintain their base. The US-based news website Quartz began operations on Facebook producing content for mobile phones and tablets as it found that growth in readership of news was on those devices. It was only later that Quartz designed a desktop version.

“Clearly we think a lot about Quartz’s presentation on Facebook based on the conviction that patterns of people finding content on their mobile devices via social networks actually reaches a wider demographic than you would have thought,” said Quartz’s founder and editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney.

Just as many individuals and companies can make a good living on Facebook selling products and services direct using all the nifty Facebook tools to gain followers and sales, so too can individual journalists. It all starts with having good content with interesting links, images, and updates every day. Then you add as many affiliate programmes as you can get, start writing e-books. By creating fan pages (and websites to go with them) you can then start selling posts on these pages. You can also join the Facebook posts market or Facebook fanpage market.

Another tool for journalists which has become popular in the last year is Snapchat which has become an important player in the social media landscape. While it has mostly been used by celebrities and individuals, many journalists and news organisations use Snapchat as a fresh way to deliver the news and connect with audiences.

Some of the news organisations that use Snapchat include the South China Morning Post; Al Jazeera English (using its network of 80 bureaus to cover underreported stories); BBC News (journalists report like they would in a television news segment);  The New Yorker (shows how they make their editorial decisions and interactions with readers); National Geographic (posts informal snaps of content); ABC News (Australia); CBS News; AFP; NBC; The New York Times; The Washington Post; Le Monde.

Former winner of the FCC’s Photographer of the Year Awards John Stanmeyer, a National Geographic photographer, understood the app’s power very quickly and used it both for the company and his own account.

For freelance journalists, it’s another useful tool to get the word and image out – and many around the world have taken advantage of it. Former winner of the FCC’s Photographer of the Year Awards John Stanmeyer, a National Geographic photographer, understood the app’s power very quickly and used it both for the company and his own account. He is also an avid user of Twitter and is considered a pioneer for using Instagram.

“Snapchat brings the reader into the story. Each viewer becomes a part of the assignment. They are my travel companions,” Stanmeyer was reported as saying. “When millions of readers pick up the magazine each month, they only see 12 to 15 photographs. But so much more takes place.”

As mobile devices increasingly dominate the scene, so too does the so called mobile journalist or mojo… believe it or not. These days there is a wealth of resources for budding mojos online. Both Twitter and Facebook have practical tips about the language that suits you better and for the type of phone you work with. Mojos are particularly active on Twitter.

Take your measure

While news outlets are increasingly open about the need to better engage their readers, definitions of what “audience engagement” actually is can be inconsistent at best and elusive at worst. Engaging and interacting with readers isn’t just essential for staying relevant – it can make or break a freelancer or newsroom’s financial survival as well.

It is straightforward enough to measure the metrics of a website or story through Google Analytics. For tracking how well your organisation is performing on social media sites, both Facebook and Twitter have built-in analytics. While traffic analytics can give an effective snapshot of an audience’s browsing habits, they don’t show the full picture of how readers interact with content. This can be done with a reverse Twitter or Facebook search which has proved an effective way to find people engaging with your news content. Another way is to place your link into Twitter and see who is talking about it – then to engage with that audience. There is also the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Impact Tracker, an open source platform for monitoring and visualizing stories’ long-term impact over time.

Online videos

Producing online videos either as part of websites or on YouTube has become profitable and a competitive business. In mobile device-savvy Hong Kong where some 96% of smartphone users browse the Internet daily, the average user watches more than 147 online videos per month which averages to 12 hours of online streaming every month.

What makes YouTube the place to go is its YouTube Partner Programme where contributors share advertising revenue with the site, with the contributor taking 55%.

Tommy Leung produced a video – Everyday Narcissism Worsens – which became viral three years ago, where he uses a “freestyle” tirade about vain Chinese men who post “selfies” on social networks. It has since it had over 1.5 million hits and 15,000 likes. Using this self-made celebrity, Leung has turned it into a business making freestyle monologues about everyday bugbears as well setting up his own new media company which provides product placement services to brands and creates viral videos for clients,

Bren Lui is an established YouTube beauty expert who started video blogging when the programme first started in 2011. For Norma Chu, it all started with a food blog and her DayDayCook website which developed into YouTube channel of culinary videos and recipes. The site now gets 1.5 million page views per month and 120,000 unique users that Chu pushes to her website via her YouTube channel. To maintain the channel she produces some eight to 15 short videos a week.

Money making online: Journalists can make money online, but it does take a combination of opportunity, luck and plain hard work.

Funding from an angel investor (eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media) or funding from a corporation that is willing to make a long-shot, but potentially high yield investment (some of Bloomberg’s ventures)

Ads from real (not network) advertisers; add network ads; AdSense ads from Google; outbrain-style links to other people’s content that pay when readers click it; native advertising (paid content that matches the website’s editorial standards while meeting the audience’s expectations), and make the native ads yourself (and thereby get a production fee). Also build a microsite for the native content and get paid separately for that.

Subscription (no content unless you pay); paywall (some content, then you have to pay, like the New York Times); micropayment (pay for each individual piece of content); membership (content is free, but bonus stuff for members); tablet-only subscriptions; paid app; tip jar (asking for support without perks); Kindle subscriptions.

Sales revenue: Sell swag and merchandise directly to readers; Amazon Associates revenue (via links in stories); Amazon Associates revenue where you assign stories about products in order to get the sales cut; sell your own merchandise but through a company that fulfils it and pays you a cut (Café Press).

Syndicate stories to other digital publishers to run on their sites; syndicate stories to print publications; syndication for textbooks/academia; LexisNexis; syndicate content for advertiser’s microsite.

Promote yourself through: public events (ticket and corporate sponsor revenue); conferences for professionals (ticket revenue, badge sponsorship, mobile service sponsorship, booths/expo revenue); bring people in for content of event, then sell them something; native events put on for advertiser; paid parties: readers pay to socialise with you; teach classes for readers or other journalists; Webinars.

Foundation funds journalism on a favourite subject; university funds journalism on a favoured subject; donations from foundations not tied to a particular project; kickstarter fundraising.

Mobile banner ads; mobile and tablet interstitials; video ads from real advertisers; network video ads; Google/YouTube pays to have you create video; YouTube video revenue share.

Podcast ads — not host-read; podcast ads, host-read, paid for click-through/sign ups; podcast ads, host read, not paid for performance; podcasts created for sponsors; product placement – get paid for using products and reviewing them.

Publish an e-book of your digital content; Kindle singles and other e-books; sell unusual books for non-Amazon publishers; sell photo archives both digitally and as prints; sell access to archives.

Other sources. Use your Google page rank power to put in links to other places and get paid for referrals; sponsored tweets; get paid to make Facebook posts on a particular subject; ads in emails; build apps for people; produce higher-end specialised products; targeted research for subscribers who pay a premium (BI Intelligence); join an affiliate programme; get people to sign  up for an email list for an advertiser, as Upworthy does; sell your subscriber data; sell your email lists.

Build a platform, put great journalism and/or photos on it, and sell the platform (Atavist storytelling site now backed by angel investors).

It seems that hardly a day passes that individuals using social media and websites in China are restricted, closed down or prosecuted, usually with some variation of “inciting subversion of state power” as the reason. China’s almost blanket control of the country’s Internet – and consequently all forms of public dissent – has become the model for other countries  to emulate for many of the same reasons.

The latest of these is the case of Kwon Pyong, who had been active on social media speaking out against authoritarian rule and human rights violations in China and who also participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2014. He was indicted in February by the authorities who cited 15 comments he posted on Twitter and Facebook, both of which are blocked in China. Days before his trial began, Kwon’s lawyers were dismissed, a tactic increasingly used by Chinese authorities to block activists’ right to effective legal representation.

On another front, The New York Times app was wiped from Apple’s App Store in China in January. The paper’s website has been blocked in China since 2012 when Chinese authorities moved against it and other international publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. But readers in China could continue to access content through the paper’s English and Chinese-language apps.

The New York Times app was wiped from Apple’s App Store in China in January.

Also in January, mainlanders who got around the block to big-name websites by using virtual private networks may now face criminal charges. The use of VPNs and special cable connections in China must now be approved by the government, essentially making these services illegal in the country.

In early February, Guangxi Normal University Press social media editor Dai Xuelin received a five-year prison sentence for running an “illegal business operation”. Dai and his business partner Zhang Xiaoxiong, who was sentenced to 3.5 years, had been independently distributing unauthorised books from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Their case was reportedly handled by the same Ningbo police who pursued their sources, the five Causeway Bay booksellers who went missing in late 2015.

The case of the arrest of news website 64 Tianwang founder Huang Qi last December is fairly typical of what news websites can expect for “disclosing state secrets” – which can mean a sentence of many years in prison. Since then, 64 Tianwang’s “citizen journalists” continue to suffer systematic repression by the authorities.

While China’s news website journalists can face serious consequences, conditions for foreign correspondents in China also remain difficult, with journalists reporting cases of harassment, surveillance, and restrictions on where they can work, according to findings by the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China which were reported in detail in the last issue of The Correspondent.

In China, internet censorship tightens

China’s powerful internet censorship body the Cyberspace Administration of China further tightened its grip on online news reports towards the end of 2016  by warning all news or social network websites against publishing news without proper verification.

“All websites should bear the key responsibility to further streamline the course of reporting and publishing of news, and set up a sound internal monitoring mechanism among all mobile news portals [and the social media chat websites] Weibo or WeChat,” Xinhua reported at the time.

“It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts,” it said.

The CAC also ordered its regional subordinates to fully fulfill their duties on the basis of content management, strengthen supervision and inspection, and severely punish fake news or news that deviated from the facts.

“No website is allowed to report public news without specifying the sources, or report news that quotes untrue origins,” Xinhua said, adding that the fabrication of news or distortion of the facts were also strictly prohibited.

A number of popular news portals, including Sina.com, Ifeng.com, Caijing.com.cn, Qq.com and 163.com, had been punished and given warnings for fabricating news before distributing it.

Officials say internet restrictions, including the blocking of popular foreign websites such as Google and Facebook, are needed to ensure security in the face of rising threats, such as terrorism, and also to stop “the spread of damaging rumours”.

And the authorities have their work cut out for them with more than 600 million Internet users, 400 million mobile users, and 300 million microbloggers. The amount of pure content and communication created and enjoyed hourly is staggering.

Before the authorities began tightening China’s Great Firewall just over three years ago, much of that content was unimaginable these days: pointed comments, reporting, pictures, and jokes on corruption, food safety, transport conditions, dodgy deals, abuse of authority, and scores of other challenging topics.

Now the likes of Sina Weibo, a feature-rich, user-friendly platform that enjoys immense popularity, and other social media sites such as Tencent (the second-largest microblogging platform), YouKu, a video-sharing site, and Renren and Kaixin, Facebook-like social networking sites are being ultra- careful to avoid prosecution or restrictions by the authorities.

In the past two years some of the banned words and phrases – most you would expect – including: Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law (mistress, etc) and almost any combination of words or associations

Microblog platforms use a variety of methods to comply with government censorship requests. Keyword filtering is the most widely deployed method to limit content. Some terms will prevent a post from being published at all; others will mark it for editorial review, while other terms cannot be searched through the platform’s search engine, making those posts difficult to access.

China Digital Times researches and maintains lists of terms banned by Sina Weibo search and has collected more than 3,000 banned or temporarily banned search words over the past five years. In addition, Sina Weibo users often report that their posts have been published for only the author to see, so they may not realise at first that they have been censored.

In the past two years some of the banned words and phrases – most you would expect – including: Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law (mistress, etc) and almost any combination of words or associations; of all things Zhou Fang (internet controlling body); flowers bloom in warm spring (lifting ban on publications); Tibetan government-in-exile, but also the parliament of the Central Tibetan Administration, and the Dalai Lama; June 4 and Tiananmen, massacre and tanks (pointed at a person), student movement; Hong Kong and riot and demonstration, universal suffrage, Ten Years (film); forbidden to broadcast, Freedom to Write Award, Southern Metropolis News; go back on one’s word; female infants and family planning; protest, take to streets, dark night forum, human rights; Kashgar and violence, terrorist attack, holy war, Muslim (beasts); violence and terror, weapon, explosive devices; entreaty to take power, army change; Cultural Revolution, incompetent (public security), communist thief, elder (continues to live), death sentence, removal from office, secret execution; of course, anything Taiwan; there also is a focus on moral tone – various swear words (and body parts), names of drugs – to name a few.

If a user posts on a forbidden topic despite the filtering techniques, their account can be closed temporarily as a warning, or permanently for repeated offenses. According to an internal management notice from Sina that was leaked online, any “harmful” information that is posted must be deleted within five minutes, and posts by blacklisted users, who are still allowed to have an account, must be checked before publishing. Also, weibo service providers are required to give public security agencies access to their back end, through which officers can directly enter keywords that should be blocked and immediately delete videos and photos.

Besides the keyword filter system there are also personnel to manually review content before publishing, and transfer that information to a third tier where staff track current events to help the front end improve and update their banned keyword lists.

Citizen News joins the news website fray

A new Chinese-language website pledging to provide Hong Kong with “independent, accurate and fair” news is the latest journalism venture to open in the city, in an attempt to counter increasing Chinese control of the media. Citizen News was launched January 1 by a group of journalists, including Kevin Lau Chun-to and Daisy Li Yuet-wah, who say they plan to cover a wide range of issues and views across the political spectrum.

The idea of Citizen News was developed in 2014 when Lau was recovering from an attack in which an unknown man slashed the former editor-in-chief of the Chinese-language daily Ming Pao with a meat cleaver. It is unclear whether the attack was linked to Lau’s journalism, but in an interview with The New York Times Lau said he could not think of any other reason for it.

Citizen News website offers grants to journalists covering issues that are ignored by the media.

As the Chinese government continues to increase its influence over the city’s traditional media, particularly through pro-Beijing business interests taking ownership of newspapers, the attack on Lau has come to symbolise the extent to which the situation has deteriorated. A group of news websites has emerged to counter the tide of this restrictive environment, but the journalists behind them face the risk of being detained when travelling to the mainland, financial uncertainty, problems with access, and cyberattacks.

An example of the pressures faced is illustrated by the case of Tony Tsoi Tong-hoo, the co-founder of House News, who unexpectedly closed the news website in July 2014. Shortly after the closure, Tsoi, who was also CEO of a Hong Kong electronics manufacturer, had gone missing for several days earlier in the month. In a note released to the public explaining the closure, Tsoi said that he was “haunted with fear” every time he crossed the border between Hong Kong and the mainland. On one occasion State Security Police detained him and pressured him to denounce Occupy Central and the Umbrella movement.

In December 2014 Tsoi resigned from his position at the electronics company and founded Stand News with two editors from his previous outlet. To better resist external pressure and maintain independence, Stand
News abandoned the for-profit model of House News and operates as a trust financed by public donations.

The nonprofit model is also being used by Citizen News. Li, the site’s editor-in-chief and former chief executive of the online news division of Apple Daily News and Hong Kong Journalists’ Association stalwart, said the website is exploring new operation models such as crowdfunding. The website also offers grants to journalists covering issues that are often ignored by the city’s mainstream media.

“If we can succeed, we bring hope to the young journalists: if we old people can, the young people definitely can,” said Li.

Crowdfunding is also used by the English-language news website Hong Kong Free Press, which was founded in 2015. Its editor-in-chief, Tom Grundy, said that funding remains a continuing concern, but that he has become less worried as the website matured. “If we do good work, I think our readers will support us each year,” Grundy said. The site’s second crowdfunding campaign last year meant that it had “fully funded” 2017.

Grundy said the biggest problem for Hong Kong Free Press is the ban on journalists from digital-only news outlets accessing government press conferences and press releases – although this is currently under review by the government which is worried about the lack of a clear definition for “online media” as a reason for it being imposed.

Digital journalists also face the risk of digital and physical attacks. Oiwan Lam, co-founder of Inmedia, a Chinese-language news portal, said the website has been “a constant target of  denial-of-service attacks.”

Li said Citizen News’ founders were not overly concerned about the threat of attack or pressure. “We do what we need to do. The corrosion of press freedom starts not necessarily from pressure from power, but from news organisations choosing to self-censor,” she said.

CAPTION:

Citizen News website offers grants to journalists covering issues that are ignored by the media.

Journalism as it is conventionally understood – the printed word mediated by a pantheon of reporters and editors, the electronic media often regulated and constrained by law over content and ownership – has been besieged during the past few decades by technology, ideology and costs.

Alternative sources of information now offer endless opportunities for entrepreneurs, demagogues, narcissists and accountants to variously promote their views or maximise the returns on their employers’ investment while eroding the previously near-monopolistic grip major press, TV and radio empires, franchises and state-owned corporations had over their respective audiences.

While such an apparent democratisation of information, opinion and expression creates and serves new markets it equally erodes the previous era of cultural coherence when restricted media outlets served readily definable markets and audiences rooted in social, political and class preferences. This process at the content level may be defined as the traditional realm of ‘journalism’.

A new and potentially even more disruptive element to journalism than the borderless, unlimited terrain fashioned by the Internet is already among us. It threatens to widen rapidly expanding generational and political divisions based on access and an ability to navigate this cyber-souk of ideas, prejudices, fantasies, porn and stuff without what is now increasingly viewed as the paternalist oversight of regulators or the filtered information provided by ‘good’ journalism.

AI in the media is being promoted as a means of freeing up journalists and other creators of copy from the routine drudge work of writing material that reads like corporate boilerplate.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the Orwellian term for enabling machines to, among other functions, mimic or surpass human intellectual endeavour. The technical side of AI is beyond the scope of this piece, and far beyond this hack’s ability to explain how it works. However, its impact on journalism, specifically the written word, and likely trajectory is more readily understandable.

Briefly, AI in the media is being promoted as a means of freeing up journalists and other creators of copy from the routine drudge work of writing material that reads like corporate boilerplate. Various news media, mainly in the United States but increasingly elsewhere – including China – have been producing readily formatable copy using AI software programmes for a number of years. Sports results and economic stories have served as the testbed, reflecting their often repetitious use of language with the results sufficiently encouraging for the techies and their employers to consider more ambitious efforts. Efforts have also been made to soothe the concerns of the human, Organic Intelligence (OI), component, telling them their jobs were safe and that AI would free them up for more interesting and creative work while the boring stuff was processed in a climate-controlled shed hundreds of miles away.

According to media reports, such developments have been greeted ‘warily’ in the affected newsrooms, as well they might be given the increasingly parlous state of relations between working hacks and their paymasters. The careers of many journalists drawn into the trade during the last decades of the previous century have ebbed, flowed and often been prematurely ended by technological change. Being ‘wary’ is a rational, if polite, response for what many must know or fear is heading their way.

This interface between AI and OI will prove either a point of collegiate cooperation or a war zone where human egos are confronted by computer generated instructions, delivered by bland emails.

The laws of unintended consequences, however, are also set to kick in as AI starts to seep up from templated copy and into what its promoters see as its editorial function of searching massive global data bases in near real time and then produce a basic story that can be sent instantly to innumerable subscribers while directing OI hacks towards angles they may have overlooked or had been unable to connect a complex skein of dots.

This interface between AI and OI will prove either a point of collegiate cooperation or a war zone where human egos are confronted by computer generated instructions, delivered by bland emails or the sort of soft female voice used by the US air force in its missile silos to talk the firing crew through the Armageddon launch sequence. This will likely lead to the often sweary exchanges many of us have had with satnavs and Siri, the modern equivalent of the sullen muttering that followed a real editor pointing out the gaping holes or unpursued angles in submitted stories.

A dystopian take on the march of AI into the newsroom and studio sees new and notionally more nimble and literate AI software being rolled out, cementing the confluence between cost and content. Readily cross-referenced stories written in the wire service style of dynamic first grafs followed by the more static contextual copy lends itself to AI templating, exponentially accelerating the production process while incrementally reducing employment opportunities. As confidence in the systems develops, OI editorial oversight will come under increased scrutiny for relevance – and of course cost.

Owners and their editorial and financial consigliere will be first tempted and then impelled to push the technology deeper into previously red-lined areas of content generation – features without any market moving or libelous risk would be good place to begin. The OI’s would either surrender to, sulk over or seek to sabotage the remorseless destruction of their trade and livelihoods. Journalism as still practiced in open societies would fade to grey.

As newsrooms struggle with dwindling resources, it’s not hard to imagine a future where AI plays an increasing role in mainstream media, but whether that is good news for journalists and readers is another story.

A counter scenario offers, for OI’s at least, a more positive outcome based on AI’s potential to fail to meet the expectations of what much of the market for the written word wants to consume, coupled with a number of systemic and anticipated flaws in a machine’s ability to produce original thought – admittedly a not infrequent OI failing.

For example, how to write software that comprehends humour, irony, sarcasm and puns? While the proponents of AI in journalism argue that the creative process will remain under the control of mammals, where are these creatures to come from when the basic tradecraft of the job has been usurped by equipment, offering few entry level avenues into the work of manipulating and ordering words?

Somewhere between these two parameters lies the probable outcome of the melding of AI and OI into a workable means of controlling cost, employing creative talent, targeting increasingly discrete markets and maintaining an approximation of the journalism we still know and appreciate.

However, as with all technological advances, there comes a time when the new becomes common place and effectively vanishes. AI will achieve this feat when it is caught making up quotes, going off the air for few hours as it bunks off the cyber equivalent of the pub and is elected virtual president of the FCC.

AI-powered journalism

AI-powered journalism has been around for a few years, with a handful of companies like Narrative Science and Automated Insights capable of producing basic data-heavy news items for sports and stock analysis, but it  has become a serious contender since the Washington Post developed the Heliograf AI software specifically for its Twitter feed of the Rio Olympics last year.

The Post then followed up with a more advanced version with a stronger editorial capability to cover the US elections and are working to transform Heliograf into a hybrid content management system using both AI and human input.

“This dual-touch capability allows The Post to create stories that are better than any automated system, but more constantly updated than any human-written story could be,” said Jeremy Gilbert, The Post’s director of strategic initiatives.

The Washington Post’s automated Twitter feed covering the Rio Olympics in real time.

The Post is reportedly planning to license this new AI CMS to clients like Tronc, a consortium that includes the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and dozens of other regional papers.

Thomson Reuters have recently teamed up with Graphiq, a semantic technology company, to provide publishers access to an enormous database of interactive data, which is constantly updating in real time. Associated Press has partnered with Automated Insights to deliver stock market reports and sports coverage. Start-ups Persado and CortX are also making serious inroads into AI generated copywriting and web content respectively.

China’s Tencent Holdings has developed Dreamwriter, its own AI media software, and claims that it will provide reporters more time to perform more complex and challenging reporting tasks, while the software critically analyses big data and produces basic stories.

Cheap computing power is driving  rapid advances in AI technology beyond mere grunt work. In time it is expected to do things like search the web to see what people are talking about, then check to see if a story is being covered. If not, then either alert editors or write the piece itself. Mind you it’s not a perfect AI world yet, when Facebook fired its Trending module’s human editors last year and let an algorithm take over, it promoted a story which falsely claimed that Fox News had fired anchor Megyn Kelly and then racked up thousands of Facebook shares and millions of views before it could be removed.

But Narrative Science’s Kris Hammond predicts that “A machine will win a Pulitzer one day” and goes on to estimate that 90 percent of news content could be written by computers by the mid-2020s.

As newsrooms struggle with dwindling resources, it’s not hard to imagine a future where AI plays an increasing role in mainstream media, but whether that is good news for journalists and readers is another story.

The Journalist and Media Studies Centre and The Correspondent are putting together a programme where students from the JMSC will report on an issue related to journalism and media under the guidance of JMSC’s faculty and editors from the magazine.

“It’s an exciting opportunity for our students to learn from professionals and get exposure. The Correspondent’s long history of serving the journalism community in Hong Kong will provide a great learning opportunity for future journalists,” said JMSC Director Keith Richburg.

Keith Richburg said JMSC students would learn from professionals and get exposure. Photo: Sarah Graham

The partnership will begin with students producing reports on social media and censorship in China, using Weiboscope, a JMSC research project led by Dr King-wa Fu, which tracks social media posts from a select group of Chinese microbloggers who are being censored on the Sina’s Twitter-like platform Weibo.

Two former FCC presidents Jim Laurie and the late Diane Stormont were heavily involved with JMSC as teachers and programme leaders. In fact, not long after JMSC started Stormont was one of the first students of its Masters programme. Photographer Kees Metselaar has been a teacher with the programme for the past seven years.

The JMSC was founded in 1998 with the goal of bringing professional journalism education to Hong Kong’s premier university. Over the past 17 years, students and staff of the JMSC have won some of journalism’s most prestigious awards including the FCC’s Human Right’s Press Awards.

At a time when China is tightening the screws on Hong Kong’s freedoms, US senators Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton have introduced the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act that “establishes punitive measures against government officials in Hong Kong or mainland China who are responsible for suppressing basic freedoms in Hong Kong”.

The bill, which replaces the US-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992, was updated to reflect the latest political developments in Hong Kong and made suggestions such as freezing the assets of people responsible for kidnapping Hong Kong booksellers.

Rubio and Cotton, respectively the co-chair and commissioner of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said the Act “would renew the US’ historical commitment to freedom and democracy in Hong Kong at a time when its autonomy is increasingly under assault.”

The proposed Act reaffirms this principle, and that the Secretary of State would be required to certify that Hong Kong is sufficiently autonomous before enacting any new laws or agreements affording Hong Kong different treatment from the China.

Chinese journalists in jail. China is consistently among the world’s worst jailers of journalists. This year, it has been eclipsed by Turkey, which is holding a record number of journalists behind bars. But since the Committee to Protect Journalists began conducting an annual census in 1990, China has topped the ignoble list 18 times. China currently has 38 Chinese journalists behind bars.

It’s that time of the year again for the annual Board election for the year 2017-2018.

If you have some ideas that you want the Board to run with or maybe you would like to give your time and effort to the future of the Club, then you are encouraged to stand for the Board.

The nomination process is pretty straightforward: from March 10 you can fill in a nomination form for the category of membership for which you are qualified. Nominations close on Wednesday April 5 at the Nomination Meeting. At this meeting, it is also possible to nominate yourself from the floor.

Ballot papers and candidates’ bios will be sent out to members by April 12. The ballot will close on Wednesday May 24 at 3pm sharp. This will be followed by vote counting.

The long voting period was originally put in place to allow members who travel or are on holidays to have the opportunity to vote.

At the end of the AGM on Friday May 25 the new Board will be formally declared. The current Board will then perform a small handover ritual. Usually following the AGM the new Board will meet in session for the first time.

Then it’s free drinks at the bar for members.

The annual FCC staff party in late January at the Golden Bauhinia restaurant in the Convention Centre was its usual boisterous self. The staff, Board, members and guests put on their glad rags and competed in a bunch of drinking and eating games. It wasn’t too competitive as everyone got a prize.

On March 3, 1991, a taxi driver was pulled over by Los Angeles police ending a high-speed chase. After exiting his vehicle, four officers surrounded the driver. Three began beating him while another stood watching. They were unaware that George Holliday was overlooking the scene from a nearby balcony and videotaping the brutality. Holliday sent the tape to a local television station, which broadcast it. The video was picked up and rebroadcast worldwide. The driver, Rodney King, became internationally known. A state jury later acquitted the officers and the subsequent riots resulted in at least 55 people dead and 2,000 injured. It took the California National Guard to quell the unrest.

Since Holliday’s videotape, countless altercations of all kinds involving police and security forces have been captured on camera and shared with the world. Phone cameras are ubiquitous and countless people see themselves as citizen journalists. By now, every force on the planet ought to realise that the world is watching. But somehow they keep on forgetting.

Ken Tsang assaulted and arrested by Hong Kong Police during the Occupy Central protests. Photo: AFP

That includes the Hong Kong police force, seven of whom have just been tried, found guilty of assault and given two-year jail sentences for dragging a protester – who was already in custody – under an overpass and administering a beating during the Occupy protests in 2014.

It was dark beneath the underpass, so maybe they thought no one could see them as they punched and kicked Ken Tsang. Maybe they were just oblivious to what was not immediately in front of them. Maybe they didn’t care. Only they can say.

Their defense lawyers argued that the tape, shot by cameramen for a local television station, should not be accepted as evidence. That failed. Then they argued, also unsuccessfully, that the tape might have been edited by unknown persons (the station denied that the tapes had been altered). In the end, the pictures told the story.

The officers, who were not inexperienced, forgot the lesson of the Rodney King case and of so many other similar abuses: You are not alone, even when you think you are. Even CCTV cameras intended to help law enforcement observe traffic, or to assist security guards stationed at buildings, can be capturing you and your behaviour.

The lyrics of the old pop song have never been more literally true: “Remember when you tell those little white lies/’Cause the night, has a thousand eyes.”

What is surprising about the Ken Tsang saga is not that it happened, but that we learned about it. In fact, allegations of abuse by the police are far from rare.

On historical average, 80 percent of complaints of assault by police are withdrawn by the complainants or deemed not pursuable. Of the remaining 20 percent, virtually all are found to be either “no fault,” “false” or “unsubstantiated.”

Despite the generally good overall reputation of the Hong Kong police force, numerous cases (sometimes hundreds) of alleged assaults are reported every year to CAPO, the Complaints Against Police Office. CAPO is under the police and is in turn monitored by the Independent Police Complains Council (IPPCC), a statutory body formed in 1993 whose members are appointed by the chief executive. Neither body has been uncontroversial, right up the present.

On historical average, 80 percent of complaints of assault by police are withdrawn by the complainants or deemed not pursuable. Of the remaining 20 percent, virtually all are found to be either “no fault,” “false” or “unsubstantiated.” I remember covering the legislature in 2013 when Secretary for Security Lai Tung-kwok, responding to a legislator’s question, said: “In the past five years, no complaint cases involving assault were found to be ‘substantiated.’”

There had been 323 complaints of assault the previous year.

Lai went on to say that many of the complaints were found to have been made by individuals who were themselves charged with an offence at the time, and who raised the assault allegation as part of their defense, only to drop the CAPO complaint afterwards.

So what we have seen over the years is a complaints mechanism where assault complaints are filed but not substantiated.

Lai’s answer came 12 years after the Los Angeles riots and a year before the 79-day Occupy demonstrations. In between, the police had already begun sending their own video crews to shoot protests, drawing complaints from the journalists with whom they jostle for position, as well as from demonstrators concerned about facial recognition and the chilling effect on public protest. The police in the field should be well acquainted with the technology by now.

But the officers who have been sentenced to two years in prison for beating Ken Tsang somehow forgot that world was watching, just as it watched what happened to Rodney King and so many after him. One hopes that this realisation will somehow help deter the use of excessive force in the future. But experience suggests that while some things will happen out of sight, others will happen in just enough light that once again the world will be watching.

Written by Francis Moriarty

Mike Simms, veteran editor with a career that spanned over five decades in five countries, died at 73 in early January.

Always the gruff gentleman, Mike could often be found holding up the Main Bar at the end of a late shift sharing his stories and strong opinions with the likes of Greg Torode and the late Walter Kent.

Armed with a razor-sharp wit, mastery of English and grasp of Latin, Simms will be remembered for schooling generations of reporters and sub-editors on the importance of good language, saving many a story from the trappings of tautology and verbiage.

Mike Simms, centre in the checked shirt, died in early January. He is pictured here with colleagues from the South China Morning Post. Photo: Facebook

His trademark dry humour would be displayed regularly on Facebook – often as sardonic one-liners or via his wildly popular “tautology of the day” posts. Many would feature his beloved dog Scrap, with whom he enjoyed a good hike.

“Despite his gruff exterior, Mike had a mischievous sense of humour that will be sorely missed by all those who knew him in both the newsroom and his favourite Wanchai bar,” a friend and fellow journalist said.

Simmsy, as he was affectionately known, made his mark and a lot of friends in many newsrooms: he was, before his time in Hong Kong, deputy news editor of the Evening Star, chief subeditor and columnist at the New Zealand Herald;  The Guardian and Sheffield Morning Telegraph in the UK; deputy chief subeditor at The Age, Melbourne; and chief copy editor at The Monitor, Singapore.

He joined The Standard in 1987, working his way up from chief copy editor, chief sub and night editor to editor. Simmsy joined the South China Morning Post in 2004 as chief copy editor and retired in 2014.

Simms, described as a “firebrand editor” with high expectations and “a true individual”, often gave short shrift to so-called conventional wisdom or the “standard Western view”.

Deeply competitive, he abhorred the bad use of English and those who transgressed were unlikely to do so again.

Mike Simms with his beloved dog, Scrap. Photo: Facebook

Simms set himself up as a freelance copy editor after his retirement where he continued his tireless campaign… On his “Good Language” website, Simms wrote: “Times are tough for our language, as mass media abandon time-honoured quality-control procedures and the days when no one’s work reached the public without undergoing rigorous editing fade into pre-internet history.

“These aren’t just the arcane concerns of some crusty old grammarian, they should be the concerns of anyone who relies on the language as an effective communication tool.

“Time will tell whether this trade-off between credibility and cost will prove sustainable for outlets that need to be taken seriously. I suspect not.”

Damon, his son who lives in the Philippines, said on a Facebook posting that Simms “loved Hong Kong with a passion”. He was self-taught in Cantonese and was “a decent cook” of his favourite local dishes.

Post editor-in-chief Tammy Tam said: “I was very saddened to hear of Mike’s death. He was a hugely influential and dedicated member of our local news team, and did much to mentor our reporters and sub-editors. His knowledge of Hong Kong society, politics and government policies allowed him to speak with authority, whether it was with our most senior editors or cadets. We shall greatly miss his voice of reason.”

Simms fell ill in the Philippines three months ago while on one of his regular visits to see his young granddaughter, Gabriella. He returned to Hong Kong and was admitted to hospital with a leg infection. He suffered pneumonia in mid-December and died at Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

“I think I speak for everyone when I say that a very large part of our lives disappeared on Friday, and that his passing has left a hole in many people’s lives that will never be filled,” Damon said.

Simms leaves wife Jean, sons Damon and Anton, grandchildren Paige, Lauren and Gabriella.

The very reasonably-priced semi buffet lunch is available in the Main Dining Room. Photo: carstenschael.com

The Club has launched a new menu option for the Main Dining Room.

The Semi-Buffet Lunch offers a choice of four main courses accompanied by a wide selection of appetizers, side dishes and desserts.

And all at a very reasonable price: if you choose just the salad bar plus appetizer it’s HK$128 per person; if you go for the full semi-buffet menu it’s HK$220 per person. Great value!

The main courses include seared Atlantic salmon, Tandoori lamb chops, seared chicken breast, and tossed linguine with mixed mushrooms. There is also salmon and ham available at the carving station.

The salad bar and appetizers include: Mussel Pâté with Ciabatta; Chayote & Chicken in Curry Mayonnaise; Beet & Onion Salad; Mixed Bean Salad; Marinated Hearts of Artichoke; Roasted Zucchini, Aubergines and Capsicums with Garlic; Hydroponic Greens; Green Papaya and Green Mango with Thai Chilli Sauce ; Mixed Vegetable Salad with Condiments; Tomato & Mozzarella Salad; Egg, Capsicum & Sweet Corn Salad.