Vigils to mark the date were banned in all areas except Hong Kong and foreign journalists were prevented from filming in Tiananmen Square – including BBC journalist James Reynolds, as can be seen in this truly bizarre video footage.

On Monday I went along to a panel discussion put on by the Frontline Club between journalists with an intimate knowledge of China and an organiser of the Tiananmen Square protests 20 years ago.

Below is video from the event and a summary of some of the talking points from the night.

Panelists -
Tim Marshall (Foreign Editor, Sky News)
Sirong Chen (China Editor, BBC World Service)
Isabel Hilton (Editor, China Dialogue)
Shao Jiang (Protest organiser and Amnesty blogger)

Tiananmen, 20 years on

The impact of what happened 20 years ago is still rumbling on. SJ, who took part in the protests, stressed that people still care but that “Government propaganda said people just move on.”

Freedom via the internet?

A few years ago the government introduced their own blogs in response to their growing popularity. The only hitch was that nobody read them.

Much has been made of the democratising power of the internet and IH is one of those people who believe that the internet could well be a catalyst for political change in China. “The Party has an interesting problem with the internet – it is by nature much more cheeky, irreverent and confrontational,” IL said. “Mockery is widespread.”

Freedom via capitalism?

As Capitalism takes root in China, IH argued that there would come a point where Chinese citizens would want to defend their consumer rights – if you buy baby milk that poisons your child, for instance.

Little hope for democracy

Officially the Party plans to have elections for all regional posts by 2010, but the elections will only be contested within the party. National elections or multi-party elections are unforeseeable. “I’m not willing to wait for national elections in my working years,” SC said. IL pointed out that the Party had actually discussed the possibility of splitting itself into four separate parties but that the plans had been shelved.

China and the new world order

“You have a hell of a lot of people who believe that the West ruined China’s prosperity,” IH said. This is historically inaccurate, she argues, but a lot of Party officials told her that that China was no longer in a mood to be pushed around. “Quite honestly what officials say to you after dinner when they’ve had too much Mao time can be quite alarming. ‘In a few years we’ll invade Taiwan and you won’t be albe to do anything about it’; ‘In a few years we’ll have eliminated the Tibetans and you Western liberals will just have to put up with it’. People say these things.”

On work experience at the Times last week I was sent out to Westfield Shopping Centre in White City to see if the recession had had an impact on London’s newest and most extravagant shopping centre. The article I contributed to can be found here.

One in ten units were unoccupied. Only six of these empty stores were set to be filled by retailers. The vacant shops have forced Westfield to think creatively about how to fill excess floor space. Most were blocked up to hide the unsightly units from shoppers and given over to nearby stores to use as shop windows for their goods. In many parts of the centre mannequins stood alone in deserted stores.

A new media sermon from blogger Jeff Jarvis

When you pay £6,000 for a journalism course you’re somewhat inclined to think of journalism as a complex profession. I’ve* stumped up £6,000 to do the Newspaper Journalism postgraduate diploma at City University and therefore tend to think along these lines.

Up to a point. ‘The citizen journalists are coming’ say bloggers and online media lecturers – there are a growing number of examples of citizen journalists breaking stories. Look at Mayhill Fowler’s story about Barack Obama’s un-PC comments on the campaign trail for Huffington Post. See the twitter users who reported the 2008 Los Angeles earthquake first, or posted dramatic pictures of the ‘Miracle on the Hudson River’.

In times gone by newspapers only needed to compete with the newsgathering prowess of their rivals. Increasingly they are now having to compete with the newsgathering potential of the public.

As the number of voices increases, this changes the role of the professional journalist. Journalists now have a responsibility to bring cohesion, context and accuracy to news from the social web. This means introducing new content models for journalism which collaborate with the public rather than simply dictating to them.

Professional journalists cannot afford to dismiss the newsgathering potential of the public. It is not enough to just acknowledge that the tools are out there for people to create entertaining or informative content. Journalists must acknowledge that these tools are being used to a high standard.

Nobody puts this better than Jeff Jarvis in his post ‘The myth of the creative class’.

More from Jeff Jarvis -

* my grandparents

Photo by Eirik Solheim.

Design is a bit of an unrequited love of mine. So when I saw this front page in the Guardian’s roll call of G20 front pages yesterday I couldn’t resist writing a quick post.

Two things really struck me about this layout. The first is the laudable use of white space. Look at it all! You could drive a lorry between those articles. The white space really breaks up the page and makes the articles easier to read.

Second was the inclusion of email addresses next to bylines. If you can’t make these out you can view the original pdf here.  This is pretty unusual, more so in the UK. Among the nationals, only the Mirror puts a reporter’s email address under their byline. Some newspapers are actively hostile to letting their readers know email addresses. Ring up the Times and a recorded voice curtly tells you ‘not to ask’ for individual email addresses. (Not that these addresses are particularly hard to guess – firstname.surname@newspaper.co.uk seems pretty universal).

With the rise of social media it’s increasingly important for newspapers to show that they are making the effort to communicate with readers. In this the Baltimore Sun and Mirror are leading by example.

I had my first taste of video reporting when I visited the Crown and Manor boxing club to interview national youth boxing champion Matthew Chanda -

For the paper I reported on news and sport stories, including -

• Olympic hopefuls’ running track is ‘causing injuries to young athletes’

• Claims police victimise children as they walk to a Hackney playground

The production weeks were knackering but good fun!

There were some interesting exchanges, but the most contentious points were saved for the bonus topic at the end – ‘What tips would you give these trainee journalists?’

Writer Anthony Thornton waded in first. He argued that this was the ‘best ever’ time to embark on a career in journalism. With the right skills any one of us could make a good living out of social media, he said.

His sunny outlook was a hard sell in a room full of soon-to-be unemployed journalists. But his theory was certainly appealing – young journalists have never had such a wealth of technology at their disposal for telling stories in a range of compelling ways. During our newspaper production fortnight at City we have been experimenting with multimedia – you can check out some of our audio, video and interactive maps at Hackney Post and Islington Now.

Anthony argued that with these basic multimedia skills we all had the potential to become the next Rafat Ali or Perez Hilton. The rest of the panel agreed and called on us all to blog, tweet and broadcast like crazy.

I’m sure they were right about the importance of social media. But with the best will in the world we’re not all going to be the next Perez Hilton. WordPress informs me that 45,400,292 words have been published today on WordPress blogs. That translates into an awful lot of commentators. Technorati has counted 133 million blogs and that’s just the ones they’ve been bothered to index.

Presumably only a tiny fraction of these bloggers are actually making a living out of blogging. There are of course a range of other factors behind blogs. For some blogging is an extension of their CV. For others it is all about connecting with an audience and writing about something they feel passionate about.

But it’s a safe bet that every one of these bloggers would like a larger audience.

This is especially true of social media ‘stars’. The more time you invest in your online presence, the better payoff you expect in terms of page hits and followers.

Top bloggers Rafat Ali and Perez Hilton

At the roundtable event, new media darling Jemima Kiss gushed about how ‘fabulous’ Twitter was. But then she would say that – her success is built on having a large crowd of fans and followers!

Social media seems to work a bit like a pyramid scheme. It is in the interests of everyone involved to suck more people in.

Photos by khrawlings, Mike Macadaan and Rex Hammock.

The unnamed author frequently develops stories that have been in the papers.  This week’s column looks at the warped reasoning behind Sir Fred Goodwin’s £693,000 a year pension (I can’t provide a link sadly as Private Eye doesn’t really do online).

In The City reminds us that Fred the Shred’s stunning pension was topped up as recently as October last year by £8m, despite the fact that RBS was already facing near bankruptcy.  Why did RBS bosses consider it acceptable to heap extra reward on such an unsuccessful chief exec?

This bizarre decision says a lot about banking culture.  In The City argues that the increased pension was effectively hush money.  RBS had sufficient grounds to sack Goodwin last year if they had wanted to do so, in which case Goodwin would have faced a reduced pension or no pension at all.  In The City explains why RBS decided not to give him the boot –

(Sacking) could have been an option.  But only if the RBS board were prepared to see him in court and wash all their dirty boardroom linen in public.  Negligence or breach of company policy when approved by the board… would be hard to prove.

Which is why there are always rewards for failure.  Contracts assume competence, so incompetence could be “due cause” to dismiss.  But companies prefer chief executives to go quietly with a Goodwin-style gag, which is cheap at the price, say their lawyers.

Why sack Goodwin when you run the risk of placing your boardroom decisions in the public domain?  Heaven forbid!  Best to keep such valuable trade secrets under wraps.

Happily for RBS, pension settlements are usually legally ‘bombproof’, says In The City.  Indeed, an RBS report in February last year stated that Goodwin was perfectly entitled to “enhanced benefits” on early retirement.  The chances of a successful legal challenge against RBS look pretty bleak.

Goodwin’s enhanced pension hints at a wider culture of deception within the City.

Photo by Oolong, used under Creative Commons.

No plans to rein in Peston at the beeb

If you believe everything you read in the Mail, then the BBC’s Robert Peston is responsible for pushing our economy off the edge of a cliff. Stories on his blog have been blamed for falls in bank shares and last summer’s run on Northern Rock. Fleet Street is also taking some flak for supposedly talking the UK into a recession.

So you’d think BBC bosses would be busy drawing up guidelines to stop their output damaging the economy. Not so, according to their director of Editorial Policy and Standards, David Jordan. He said after a lecture at City that there has been no talk of toning down BBC coverage of the crash and that the BBC was committed to “open reporting of financial information… it’s up to the market how it reacts”.

Should journalists be completely candid about the financial crisis?

Another week, another lynching mob. The press has effectively hounded Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross out of their highly paid jobs at the BBC after a week of damning headlines.

Kat Faulkner’s blog drew my attention to this article in The Indy, which claims that only two people complained about the pair’s lewd antics on Radio Two after the show. But thanks to press coverage, the number of complaints has risen to 27,000.

This prompted the BBC to suspend Brand and Ross and tonight Brand announced that he would quit his show.

Strangely Gordon Brown may have delivered the final blow by getting involved yesterday. Both the Mail and the Telegraph splashed on Brown’s ‘condemnation’ of Ross and Brand. Brown ventured off piste during a joint press conference with Nicholas Sarkozy in order to criticise the celebs. It’s not the first time that a couple of mumbled lines from Brown have helped to fuel a media frenzy. Last week Brown’s nonsensical call for an inquiry into George Osborne’s dealings with Russia’s richest man helped to keep the scandal going.

In both cases Brown spoke out of turn, but it must be fun for him to play the executioner for once.

Five! Or at least that’s how many I spotted crowding around this Volkswagen in Islington the other day…