Keep Up The Good Work
When I came home to Hong Kong and started at HKU in 1998, I thought I would spend two or three years before going back to New York City, my other home for more than two decades.
Now, here I am, 18 years later, with many new friends and colleagues I have come to know as we lived through challenging times for journalism.
Over the years, the news industry has been disrupted worldwide. Traditional newspapers have closed. Jobs in newsrooms have vanished. The media ecosystem—ownership, financing, revenue, consumption pattern—is undergoing sea change.
But change can be good. In nimble or bold steps, digital media have emerged to take up the challenge to inform citizens about what they need to know to participate in society’s governance.
Yet there is also a dark side to the digital revolution: misinformation, hate speech, censorship, cybersecurity laws and the concentration of power by the internet corporate giants. Now, more than ever, we need skilled journalists.
The core values of journalism remain unchanged: critical thinking, fairness, concern for the weak, and the courage to take on power. The skills required to uphold these values also remain the same: reporting and writing, and the ability to process complicated information in compelling ways across platforms.
We will have to keep learning and reinventing ourselves. While we are still catching up with computational journalism, visualisation, big data, we now have to cope with AR, VR, MR, drones, algorithms and machine learning, and new technology such as blockchain, which can enable journalists to maintain ever-growing lists of data records and keep them secure from tampering and revision.
We all know that press freedom in Hong Kong is being challenged, as it long has been on the mainland and in other Asian nations. But then everything is relative. One day last week, I received this email from a colleague, war correspondent Kevin Sites:
Hey All, just an FYI …Our friend Massoud Hossaini possibly in peril at The American University in Kabul.
Massoud’s tweet:
‘Help we are stuck inside AUAF and shooting followed by Explo this maybe my last tweets’
Massoud is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who has spoken at the JMSC. We were relieved later to learn he was safe.
Many great speakers such as Massoud have come to the JMSC over the last 18 years. We also have hosted great conferences and made great partners.
Most of all, we have had the privilege to help nurture great students who know the importance of telling compelling stories in whatever new ways that come along.
Hey All, just an FYI …Our friend Massoud Hossaini possibly in peril at The American University in Kabul.
Massoud’s tweet:
‘Help we are stuck inside AUAF and shooting followed by Explo this maybe my last tweets’
