Public communication in the
Internet age
Rebecca MacKinnon
University of Hong Kong, Journalism & Media Studies Centre

“Read-only” vs. “Read-write”

Journalism 2.0
Journalism 1.0
Conversation
LECTURE

Then... Now...
High cost of Low cost of
production production
Scarcity of space, Scarcity of
airtime, etc. attention

My blog as simple example
Of Web 2.0

Writing...

Linking Out

Syndicate

Feeds
from
NYT

Content freed from container

Friends recommend information

Conversation & info-sharing

“Baghdad blogger” Salam Pax

“I try to dispel the
image that Muslims
and Arabs suffer from -
mostly by our own
doing I have to say - in
the rest of the world. I
am no missionary and
don’t want to be. I run
several internet
websites that are
geared to do just that,
create a better
understanding that
we’re not all nuts hell-
bent on world
destruction.”

A portrait of global media attention:
(Data from Google News, July 2006)
Countries in red have more stories
Countries in blue have fewer
(Courtesy Ethan Zuckerman at: http://
h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman/)

127 million people 130 million people
2nd largest world economy 54th largest world economy
12582 CNN.com stories 937 CNN stories
(Data courtesy Ethan Zuckerman http://ethanzuckerman.com/)

Mass media to
citizen media

Blogs are important to
foreign journalists in China
(2006 study)

Chinese-English
“bridge blog”

More “bridge blogs”