This week's column: What Happens In Beijing...

Here's this week's column in the Weekly. Forgive the headline; I think my editors were tweaking me. (See the WHHSH discussion near the end of the piece...)

What Happens in Beijing...

How a local newspaper squandered a terrific opportunity

By STEVE FRIESS

Back when I lived in and covered Beijing earlier this decade, I used to have this odd little game I played with my friends.

My core group included women from Des Moines and Brisbane, Australia, and guys from Seattle, Manchester, United Kingdom, and Victoria, British Columbia. From time to time in our travels across the country, we'd chat up native Chinese, usually people who spoke some English, on a train or at a bar or at a restaurant. Two of my friends were becoming fluent in Mandarin, so they were at that stage when they would try out their language skills.

But here was the game: We'd meet these folks, and we'd introduce ourselves. And I would always go last. My friends would each introduce themselves and state their city or nation of origin.

And then it would be my turn, and I'd say "Las Vegas," and the reaction would be instantaneous. Eyes would brighten at those syllables, the interest would always turn my way, and almost without fail somebody would make a motion as if to pull the lever on an invisible slot machine.

Which is a long way of saying that the Review-Journal sent doofus sportswriter Ed Graney to China, and, in the process of providing the idiot's guide to Chinese customs and tourist destinations and some serviceable coverage of the sporting events occurring there, he missed the best story that was waiting for him.

I have to believe it was right in front of him. There was never a time when I was over there that I said "Vegas"—to anyone, including people who didn't speak a word of English—and didn't elicit a reaction. Surely he discovered this. The only indication we have, though, is a silly blog post about what some Australians, who were also other journalists, thought of Las Vegas, and a short bit about encountering a pair of Chinese interns whose wisest observation of our city was, "One dollar, touch butt."

So I decided to do the assignment for ol' Ed.

Read the rest HERE

Please, Ed, Make It Stop!

Apparently, I was wrong in my last post when I assumed that the Review-Journal's sports columnist Ed Graney would move on to start covering what he understands -- the sports of the Olympics -- once competitions got underway. Evidently, despite the fact that Michael Phelps broke his own world record, an American tourist was killed and the U.S. president seemed to get hot and probably completely offended half of his anti-sex religious-kook base back home by frolicking with Team USA's 7/8-naked women's beach volleyball players, Our Man In China was busy writing the idiot's guide to Beijing tourist attractions.

Today's dispatch included a predictable piece on the awesomeness of the Forbidden City complete with a few minor inaccuracies and a reference to "The Last Emperor" as well as, this being a sports writer and all, an obligatory Tiger Woods analogy. You know you're in trouble when the piece starts with "Maybe you saw the movie. Maybe you didn't." Well, gee, Ed. That's kind of what "maybe" means. Thanks for covering all the bases.

But what's worse is the sidebar on weird Chinese food offerings on a stick at Wangfujing Night Market. This offered a particularly interesting contrast because there's Ed rambling about trying the scorpions-on-a-stick and taking note of other oddities and then in the R-J's sports section there's a piece by humorist Dave Barry that mocks all the journalists at the same site doing exactly that and thinking they're so clever. Except, of course, Barry was funny and original and Ed was a cheap, cliche-soaked imitation. Barry also noticed, as Ed did not, that the Chinese weren't eating these crazy things; Wangfujing is an odd tourist trap that profits off of the West's stupidest impressions of the Chinese by playing into it. "I would not be surprised to learn that the Chinese word for scorpion is 'TV reporter food,' " Barry wrote perceptively.

Also, Barry didn't throw in a gratuitous line about the Chinese eating dog parts like Ed did because, I suspect, Barry knows this is an increasingly rare concept, as an essayist in the NY Times noted recently. In all my travels and coverage in China, from sleeping on the floor of an AIDS victim's home in Henan Province to sleeping in a yurt in the remote northwest mountains of Xinjiang, I only ever saw one instance where anyone used dog meat for food. It was in a punishingly poor area near Guilin in south-central China where the desperation was beyond anything I'd ever seen. They eat anything they can in these places and you would, too. But in a modern metropolis like Beijing? Uh, no.

Our Man In China also cracked me up in his blog by going on a little babble about how foreign newspapers were burying the news of the dead American tourist. Uh, hello? Ed didn't write a word about it in today's paper, either, and the R-J ran a long wire story from the Olympics that took well into the jump to get to this news. It appears on page 10A, about 14 paragraphs into a story that is largely about Bush's exciting day. Ed chides the China Daily, where I worked and mocked mercilessly in Editor & Publisher years ago, for putting it on page 5. That's more prominent than the R-J!

So here's my prediction for the coming week. Our Man In China will go to the Great Wall, declare it truly impressive and take note of the T-shirt vendors there as a contradiction of capitalism in a Communist nation. He'll go to the Summer Palace and marvel at the big, expensive marble boat that can't float the Empress Dowager bankrupted the Navy to build, making some comparison to some U.S. pro sports team's failure to win despite spending millions on talent. Some Chinese person will ask to take his photo and he'll write with bemusement about the experience. He'll probably get approached by a Chinese hooker who acts demure and wants to "practice her English" and he'll think, "Wow, this is my Front Page Lead tomorrow!"

Or maybe Ed will focus on the sports themselves. One can only hope.