The fifth estate

Having spent six years in the UK, I have a lot of feelings for the country. I love its culture, its diversity, the parks, the London accent and many other things. However, one thing does stand out: its freedom of the press. For an average Canadian you may think I am being silly, but I come from a city where reporters can be arrested for asking questions in a media conference. So, freedom of the press is not exactly a God-given right in some parts of the world.

Anyway, the first time I heard about the 30-year rule I was fascinated. Back in my days as a student, it was an annual event. Each year, all public records would be made available for public inspection once they had been in existence for thirty years. Then the rules were changed with effect from 2005. The essence of the change is that any citizen can request a wide range of information even before the 30-year point, though exceptions would apply to certain types of record.

A recent example is the disclosure of a document about the Falklands war, which took place in 1982. For years, most people had the perception that Margaret Thatcher had a very strong opinion about the war and wanted to win at all cost. However, the document released in 2012 shows a different picture.

The spirit here is not what Margaret Thatcher thought, but being a citizen means you have the rights to question what really happens in your government. The 30-year rule, or whatever it is called in other democratic countries, is there to protect sensitive information and to make sure it cannot be destroyed without a very valid reason. But like I said earlier, not every country has the same level of freedom and same level of respect for public information. In 2012, I found out a huge amount of public records were destroyed in Hong Kong – if you stack them up, it would be about 14 times the height of the Manitoba Hydro building in downtown Winnipeg.

There is no legislation in place to protect the public record in Hong Kong, so there is no legal implication when someone destroys any public record. Essentially they can burn every single public record even as I type this blog (the person may be tried for arson, but not for destroying public records).

The fourth estate hardly functions in Hong Kong already, and the citizens – I call them the fifth estate, have no way to find out what actually happens because any public record can be destroyed anytime. I cannot help myself but to draw parallelism between Hong Kong in 2012 and Berlin in the 1930s.

God bless Hong Kong.

 

Addicted to Cards

I was addicted to House of Cards, and I managed to finish all 13 episodes within 10 days. It had been so long since I felt attached to a drama series, and I must admit I felt lost the minute the last episode finished.

The show was recommended by an instructor, and as soon as I started watching I realized why it was addictive. It stars Kevin Spacey and it talks about politics and public relations (also known as the two loves of my life besides Alice and Andrew). How can it get any better?

One of my favourite episodes was when Frank Underwood, a Congressman, slipped false information to a reporter about the incoming Secretary of State. Frank was expecting the nomination himself, and he was pretty upset when he found out it was not going to be him. There are two lessons for politicians here: the first is you must always watch your tongue, and the second is you must always watch your tongue. With Youtube and other online platforms, your stupidity can be replayed 20 million times easily and viewed by people around the world.

Another episode talked about the power of lobbying. Where I come from, Hong Kong, lobbying is not necessary. Politics has been married to money for a very long time in my city, and under-the-table decisions are made every day blatantly. In this episode of House of Cards, lobbying drove Frank Underwood and his wife apart. Frank’s wife, Claire Underwood, ran a not-for-profit organization called Clean Water Institute (CWI). When CWI’s aids to Sudan were withheld by the Sudanese government, Claire asked Frank to speak to the Secretary of State of the US, as she thought it would resolve the issue easily. However, the US government was cutting off ties with the Sudanese government and no help could be deployed for Claire. Frank and Claire had a heated argument, and then Claire had to speak to a contact at Sancorp, an energy company. She knew Sancorp had its connection in Sudan, and in exchange of the favor, Claire had to make sure a bill that Frank was trying to push in Congress would not come through.

I do not want to spoil the show, but the key message here is that you cannot predict how people will behave when people have different interests. In this case, you can almost say a wife betrays her husband for a box of water filters. Some call it dirty politics, but to me it is the essence of democracy – you can make up your mind and do whatever you think is best, instead of following the ideology proposed by those in power – even if the person in power is your spouse.  

 

Death of the newspapers?

Many of us have been talking about the death of the print media for years because of the rise of the internet. Personally, the topic came up fifteen years ago when I studied in the UK. However, every time I go back to the UK, none of the major newspapers has disappeared except News of the World, and its disappearance had nothing to do with the internet at all.

 

The circulation of Los Angeles Times had decreased by half by 2009. Newsweek has stopped its print publication after 80 years. The Wall Street Journal started counting its online subscribers as part of its circulation back in 2003. These figures are daunting; however, the scenarios seem to be different at the other end of the world. Straits Times, a leading newspaper in Singapore, had a small increase in circulation in 2012 comparing to the year before. India has seen an increase on newspaper circulation in general in 2011; moreover, a similar trend has been reported in China, though the increase is only a modest 3.4 per cent.

 

Instead of sitting on the situation, many print media outlets have tried adopting various methods in order to stay afloat. For example, the Times in the UK was probably the first newspaper in the country to charge for online access. Straits Times charges less for its print edition than its online edition. In Hong Kong, the market share of the three most popular paid newspapers dropped from 73 per cent in 2002, to less than 60 per cent in 2009. The drop mainly came from free newspapers such as Metro and AM730. To combat the situation, the owners of these newspapers started publishing free newspapers themselves (such as Sharp Daily published by the Next Media Group), hoping that they would be able to secure some of the lost advertising revenue.

 

One of the few exceptions is the Financial Times. When all newspapers were suffering in the UK in 2010, the Financial Times made a profit. To me, the success of the Financial Times is not just that they have original content – the quality of their content is really what sets them apart. They have global offices and bureaus around the world, and they print their papers in all major markets such as New York, Hong Kong, South Africa. When SARS killed hundreds of people in Asia, the Financial Times launched its Asian edition. Now when you go to the Financial Times website, you can have access to three articles without paying anything. You will need to subscribe if you read more than three articles each month. In addition to the above moves, the Financial Times is one of the few publishers that do not work with Apple – as they consider working with Apple would affect their direct relationship with their readers, as well as their ability to make high yields. I think this strategic move was really bold. As everyone was trying to get onto the bandwagon with the apps store of Apple, the Financial Times moved away from the model. The Financial Times now has more than 600,000 of paid print and digital circulation each day, and this number has been growing.

 

In contrast to popular perception, the most active group of online news readers are in fact people aged between 25 and 34. Given the growing popularity of consuming news (and everything else) online among the younger population, the trend seems to be irreversible. For owners of paid newspapers, they must strengthen their content if they want to continue charging for their content. Otherwise they may have to consider changing its business models –from paid to free, from print to online or even from daily to weekly.

 

At the end of the day, I think everyone in the newspaper industry should think about this question: if you had to pay full price for the newspaper that you are producing, would you pay for it? If you do not think you are going to, then perhaps it is hard to expect other people willing to pay for your work.

 

Heart-breaking statistics

How should I begin? A simple statement is that over 90 percent of Hong Kongers would rather be ruled by the British than the Chinese, according to a recent opinion poll. But where does the number come from? Let’s start with the inspiration for this online poll.

A referendum took place earlier this week on the Falkland Islands about people’s opinion regarding the sovereignty of the Islands – should they remain a British Overseas Territory or go back to Argentina? The history here was that there was a war between Argentina and the UK in 1982; the UK won, and the Islands are legally British. Now let’s go back to the referendum. Almost 1700 islanders voted in this referendum, and only three people voted against.

However, the real heart-breaking statistic comes from Hong Kong. The poll that I mentioned in the first paragraph was conducted very recently online by South China Morning Post (SCMP), the only paid English newspaper in the city. The question was ‘If Hongkongers were given the option, would we choose to be a British colony again’. The last time I checked, 93 percent of Hong Kongers preferred the British to the Chinese.

In order to put it into context, you need to have some knowledge of Hong Kong history. Hong Kong was seized by the British after the Opium War in the 19^th century. The Chinese lost again in a subsequent war, and another part of Hong Kong was annexed to the British in 1898 with a lease for 99 years. Whatever the reason was, in 1984 the Chinese announced they would take Hong Kong back from the British in 1997. Then Hong Kong went through a decade of exodus where tens of thousands of people joined the queue to emigrate, as people started to become extremely worried about the Chinese communist government. The massacre in 1989 did not make it any better, and I considered it pathetic at a time that my fellow citizens would rather move to Singapore. In hindsight, they had a better idea of the Chinese government than I had.

Hong Kong was ‘taken back’ by China in 1997, and barely after 15 years the city has become a joke (otherwise the poll result would have been different).  However, I consider it very interesting that SCMP would have the courage to create such online poll since it is regarded as a pro-government paper. Anyhow, the poll may not be scientific, but no one can deny it does reflect a general sentiment – history has proved me right, the Chinese government has been trying to destroy Hong Kong, and it has done an excellent job.