Week 12
This week I had to make two changes to the Flash project of the interviews with international journalists. The Pakistani journalist asked me to use a different photo of his for his interview, and the Chinese journalist Xin Zhiming wanted to have Taiwan and the Spratly Islands added to the map of his country, or else he would rather have his interview deleted. I had to turn to my supervisors Pat Smith and Stuart H. Lorry for advice in the latter case. Xin Zhiming eventually agreed that only Taiwan should be added to the map.

From working with the international journalists, I learned that it was very necessary to try to see their issues from their view points. When Xin Zhiming asked me to include the Spratly islands on the map of his country, admittedly, as a Vietnamese citizen I felt offended, because these are disputed islands among several countries, most significantly between China and Vietnam. It is currently the most heated issue in the relationship of the two neighbors. Many Vietnamese people used to demonstrate in front of the Chinese embassy in Hanoi to protest about the issue. And the anger ran even deeper in the population, as the Vietnamese government discouraged these demonstrations for fear of displeasing powerful China. However, the fact that I tried to see things as an independent journalist helped me to reply to him in an objective and appropriate way. His problem was finally solved and he felt that he was respected.

During the week, I edited front-page photo for the main story of the week which is a slideshow Xiaoxian Ye and I produced last semester using Soundslides (see week 8).


I could not publish the slideshow the way we originally did it however, as I would have to upload the whole folder, and not one single Flash file. This is currently impossible for our Content Management System. In the end, I had to upload the photos manually on the CMS and published the slideshow the way it has always been done at the Global Journalist.
http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2009/06/09/dont-seal-our-lips/
I added a North Indicator for all the maps I produced so far, following my committee chair Daryl Moen’s suggestion. I also made two new maps of Haiti and the Gaza Strip for two articles "A show of strenght" "Access denied in Gaza"



RESEARCH:
I made a final change for the survey: moving the position of the NEXT button to the end of the Web site, after some people complained that they could not find it when it was on the right side of the page. At the end of the week, I began to make the survey public. So far I got some 30 respondents who answered all the questions. The drop-out rate was very high, fewer than half of the people who began would go through to the end of the survey.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=bP_2blR_2f2MQRi7GvsVry2H1g_3d_3d




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