A RARE GEM

China-watchers used to have to read between the lines of party newspapers and quiz refugees for information. Ground-breaking sites like The Wire China have put paid to all that, writes Mathew Scott e Wire China has been built on original reporting with the onus on delving into the history and context of its topics, rather than following clicks or picking up wire stories and calling one person before ling.

The mission statement for e Wire China at its launch in early 2020 was to “provide accurate, balanced and thoughtful reporting, in the pursuit of truth, without fear or favour”.

Since the platform went live, its output has re ected the way news gathering, when it concerns China, has evolved due to circumstance, and how platforms have adapted – or been required to adapt – to feed an unprecedented need for information about the superpower and its international business dealings.

An example of this was reporter Katrina Northrop’s two-parter e US$50 Million Question which was posted last December, and which took on an issue that rst came to light as Macau was loosening up its gaming licences to allow access to international players in 2002 – but has been on slow burn ever since. In short summary, Northrop was able to deep-dive into the often opaque business dealings of Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn in an e ort to uncover the identities of the American’s local partners, and in doing so the reporter stuck to the platform’s guidelines, which include a 20-interview minimum per story and months of work. In the end, Northrop spent about six months on the piece. As a piece of journalism by just one person, it made for a stunning exposé.

In the almost three years since e Wire China rst began posting, the platform has established a solid reputation with a full-time team, and it has tapped into the experience of the likes of veteran China watchers John Pomfret, Bob Davis and Alex Palmer. It now produces ve or six articles a week, including an expansive 3,000-word cover story, and it comes out every Sunday night at 7pm from behind a paywall.

In recent weeks there has been such diverse coverage as a dive into the complex and ultra-competitive rivalry between Singapore and Hong Kong as the cities pitch themselves to China’s ultra-wealthy, and a lengthy Q&A – one of the site’s feature attractions – with Christopher Marquis, which sees the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge discuss Mao Zedong’s continuing in uence over China’s economy.

Outside looking in e platform’s practice of covering China, and China’s international business connections, from outside the actual country re ects the reality that under the increasingly authoritarian control of Chinese President Xi Jinping it has become nigh impossible for international media to work in the country unimpeded.

But that hasn’t stopped the stories, particularly as Chinese wealth continues to spread across the globe, as e Wire China’s co-founder David Barboza wrote in a 2014 essay for Niemanreports.org.

“ ere’s no easy way to turn back the clock on investigative reporting involving Chinese businesses,” he explained. ese were issues addressed when Barboza and co-founder Lynn Zhang (a former nancier who worked in private equity, and a highly skilled corporate data analyst) rst started discussing the platform, with the template being to “cover China across borders”.

Barboza led for e New York Times from Shanghai from 2004 to 2015, which included seven years (2008-15) as bureau chief. e focus now – through e Wire China – involves covering China from outside the country and looking at global or multinational companies. e platform doesn’t have reporters on the ground in the country, so it concerns itself with the competition for the “global story”, or what stories involving China can be found outside its borders.

It also includes nding diverse voices for each article and encouraging writers to explore historical pieces and long Q&As – formats traditional media outlets such as e New York Times and e Wall Street Journal don’t usually publish. ey are also encouraged to write about companies or people that the traditional platforms might not touch.

Barboza’s interest in China – and the possibilities of reporting on it –predates his employment at the Times, with undergraduate courses at Boston University fuelling an interest in how the country had been reported on throughout history. He joined the Times in 1997 and when an opening for a business reporting based out of Shanghai came up in 2003, up went his hand. By the time he’d left, Barboza had won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for international reporting following his investigations into corruption among Chinese o cials and the o shore concealment of wealth. He was also part of a Pulitzer Prize that TIME won for explanatory reporting, which looked into Apple’s labour practices in the country. Barboza’s work – particularly when it came to investigating the wealth of former Premier Wen Jiabao and that of his extended family – relied heavily on sifting through often byzantine layers of Chinese corporate and public documents, a practice that had long been common elsewhere but had then only relatively recently been

Fo O S O Es F O E W E C

s he Wire China continues to focus on China s economic rise, and its in uence on lobal business, finance, trade, labour and the en ironment , here are four e amples of the stories it has tac led head on so far:

1. A Tale of Two Financial Hubs rent Crane loo s into the tu of war oin on between Sin apore and on on as both cities loo to lure China s super wealthy. thewirechina.com a ta e of two financia hu s singapore hong-kong/

2. Disengaged he recent spy balloon sa a is used by ob Da is as a way of e aminin the future of, and the hopes for, S China relations. thewirechina.com disengaged chinese sp a oon

3. The Fear Factor sabella orshoff e plores the ups and downs of the Chinese Communist arty s relationship with China s pri ate sector and the impact that this has and continues to ha e on the country s entrepreneurial class. thewirechina.com

Chinese Entrepreneurs

4. The 50 Million Question and The Brothers He two parter from atrina orthrop that puts a spotli ht on the property deals that led merican casino ma nate Ste e Wynn into the amblin encla e of acau and the mysterious partners he connected with to acquire the required land. thewirechina.com steve w nn and the mi ion uestion thewirechina.com the rothers he explored in China by media such as e New York Times and Bloomberg.

Blocked in China

e publication of such stories led to both those platforms being blocked in China but such information remains accessible to reporters – and data banks – outside the country due to the international nature of contemporary Chinese public and private businesses, and their need to follow international business practices.

e Wire China was established in partnership with the WireScreen data platform – which is largely driven by Zhang. It’s marketed as a platform that “analyses complex data to help companies vet deals and business partners, screen investments and better comply with government regulations and economic sanctions” and has quickly established itself as the “core of the company”. It also feeds e Wire China’s writers – and helps pay the bills, attracting investment from the US arm of the venture capital rm Sequoia Capital in 2020, as well as a more recent round of funding. ere’s also been a positive reaction

In terms of subscribers to e Wire China, the news site, Barboza estimates a 60 percent share is held by the general American market, while there has been traction from major universities including Oxford and Harvard, as well as law rms and multinationals. He also sees some readership landing from mainland China, despite the rewall that blocks the site.

A Wider Perspective

While reportin from China has become harder, reportin on China has e panded in its ran e and depth than s to an e er rowin media landscape that allows ournalists to build their own presence on platforms such as Substac . ere are three to consider:

The Sinocism China eteran China watcher ill ishop posts newsletters four times a wee , pro idin analysis, commentary and curated lin s to the important En lish and Chinese news of the day and drawin on his e perience both li in in the country for a decade and being the brains behind the China Insider column for The New York Times DealBook sinocism.com a out

Streamlined by Liz Shackleton he rise of the Chinese film industry o er the past years has captured the eyes and the wallets of the world. Former sia Editor of Screen International i Shac leton includes re ular in depth loo s into the country and its filmma ers in a wee ly newsletter that also taps into the wider issues facin the lobal film and streamin content industries. stream ined.news a out

China Talk he focus for China tech analyst ordan Schneider is co era e of China, technolo y and S China tech relations featurin ori inal analysis and annotated translations . e also podcasts, discussin China in eneral, tech policy and international relations. chinata .media a out to the platform since its launch from other China watchers. Wang Xiangwei –currently an associate professor of practice at the Hong Kong Baptist University’s Department of Journalism and a former editor of the South China Morning Post –said it was a “rare gem” in terms of both its coverage and its practices.

“I think e Wire China’s coverage o ers insights and commentaries that few other China-centric platforms can match. eir reports are calm, in-depth and insightful – a rare gem in this age of China reporting,” said Wang. n

And now it would all be is all different

In a brand-new column, Danai Howard pops up from the rabbit hole of the World Wide Web to calm the fevered brow of anyone wrestling to keep up with some of the all-too-rapid advances in tech.

If that great Victorian coiner of aphorisms, the aristocratic polymath Edward Bulwer-Lytton, had had a crystal ball, he might have written “the app is mightier than the sword”.

But wait: two centuries on, despite the multifarious bene ts of the Internet, casual users – whether they be journalists or other sorts of animal – often nd themselves oundering. How to slash through the online maze? ere’s no universal panacea, but here are nine possible remedies.

1. Dataminr.com

When a website provides a personalised video call to talk you through its uses after you sign up, you know that it’s serious software. Dataminr is essentially a monitoring service for events, images, mentions or people. It allows you to search for tweets through geolocation, or tracks any mention of keywords appearing across Twitter.

2. TinEye.com e importance of sourcing and verifying online images is paramount. Unfortunately, that task is made much harder by the amount of sharing and reposting of other people’s photos online. TinEye, with an index of 58.3 billion images, helps. e reverse image search nds a photo’s original post, whether using an image or just a URL.

3. NüVoices.com

NüVoices is an immense resource for anyone interested in China. It has built up a substantial online directory of nearly 700 international female experts on China, covering all elds from human rights to Africa relations. As the political commentary eld is often dominated by men, NüVoices boosts women and other underrepresented voices on China.

4. Canva.com

It doesn’t matter how tech savvy you are, Canva will make any graphic or video you want look professional. It o ers everything from templates, images, animations, music and more for you to create any form of graphic, whether it’s a simple business card or a data visualisation chart. Ideal for social media and marketing purposes, it’s also got an entire section dedicated to newsrooms.

5. NewsNow.co.uk

Essentially a news aggregator, NewsNow helps showcases news from thousands of publishers, helping them reach larger audiences. It monitors and promotes stories from countless websites – as long as they pass its editorial criteria – and the site’s carved out a sterling reputation for itself over the past 25 years.

6. TweetDeck.twitter.com

TweetDeck lets you build a series of customisable columns to display timelines, mentions, direct messages, lists, trends, search results, hashtags… It’s Twitter stalking, taken to a new level. e social media dashboard has been so successful that it was bought by Twitter in 2011 –though some suspect it will soon be placed behind that nice Mr Musk’s Twitter Blue paywall system.

7. WeTransfer.com

A simple solution to a common problem is a beautiful thing. WeTransfer is a wonderfully straightforward le transfer website that allows you to send and receive up to 2GB for free – a blessing if you’re working with video.

8. Google Trends (trends.google.com)

Wondering about Wordle’s popularity? Well, on Google Trends, you can track its slow decline. Searching any keyword will bring up a timeline of Google search numbers and break the results down into regions and languages and compare it to di erent queries over time. While you might not be playing Wordle anymore either, Google Trends is still a very useful tool for gauging audience interest in a topic – and assessing whether your headlines are SEO friendly.

9. Convertio.co

Wrong formatting is both dull and frustrating. For example, working in British radio and having to reformat content so that it could play on American or South African airwaves is a slow process. ankfully, Convertio is one of several websites that has since made this task a lot quicker. Whether it’s audio, video, images or archive, it’s an e cient way to make sure your content reaches everyone. n