Cynthia Guanghan Liang, 38,  is a professor at Sun Yat-Sen University in  Guangzhou, Guangdong China. She completed her PhD in Management and Mass Communications at Zhongshan University. She is currently a visiting researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media where she is studying the differences between civic media in the United States and China. According to Liang, the most salient difference is that civic media in the US is almost exclusively online while civic media in China also appears in print.  She speculated that this difference arises both because people in China are more likely to trust information in print and because many in Chinese have less access to the Internet than those in the US.

Liang related that Chinese civic media is used extensively by nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). NPOs and NGOs use civic media to promote events, recruits volunteers and solicit donations. Liang said ““Most NPOs are very grassroots. Some NPOs only have 3 or 4 people. [But] they can do many things to help people in places where the economy is not very good.” Among the noteworthy successes, was the campaign on weibo, the Chinese equivalent of twitter, to raise money to provide lunches for school children. The campaign raised significant funds and more notably attracted enough popular support that the Chinese central government began funding a school lunch program.

I decided to turn my interview with Adrienne into a Jeopardy game. You can get to the game by clicking here:  http://jeopardylabs.com/play/enter-title107485

David
I’ve seen David Larochelle blow out the candles on his birthday cake. I´ve seen how he hanged bright lights inside his apartment for Christmas, and I guess he was proud of his work. I know his mother is a retired teacher and an artist, and that she would like Action for Gun Sense in America. I know that David has a brother, Jeremy, whose only public photo in Facebook is one of David and his girlfriend, smiling. David father´s name is Rich. His parents live in Falls Church, Virginia. I know all of that and I´ve speak to David only once in my life, by phone.
David lives in Boston. He joined the Berkman Center in the fall of 2008 as Lead Engineer for Media Cloud. “These may be great times for being an Engineer”, I told him. He thinks: “Mmm….” (David usually starts his answers with a mmm) “. I´ve heard that before. And I´ve been told that we are more respected now than we used to be. And I think a lot of problems could be solved through machines, but will people trust in this approach to make a difference? I don´t know”.
Prior to joining Berkman, he was an engineer at Ounce Labs. He completed a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Computer Science, a Master’s in Computer Science at the University of Virginia, and all but the proposal and dissertation for a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
I´ve seen David in costumes. I´ve seen him dressed up as a Dalmatian sheep dog, and in Steampunk clothes, a fascinating sub genre of science fiction about steam-powered machines. I´ve seem David wearing in a kilt; elegantly dressed for a Dickensian Nineteenth Century Ballroom; in Civil War period dress, for the Returning Heroes Ball and wearing a tailcoat for the Titanic Dance Weekend. I think he loves waltz and I would bet he´s a great dancer.
As he posted once, David, as others working in the information technology industry has affection for “the socially inept nerd stereotype. Some have said that we value brilliance or apparent brilliance above all…” Does David fit in to that stereotype? “Mmmm, interesting question…I spend a decent amount of time online, and today, so many people are addicted to browsers that I don´t know if that makes me unique…Things have changed a little bit. Technology is more mobile now, so you can´t be into it without needing to be reclused in one place”.
David doesn´t seem like a reclusive person. Actually, I think he enjoys being with people, friends, family. And he likes to take part in collective-coordinated- challenges. He also likes to defy himself and he believes in the effectiveness of external deadlines, although he would like to find a way to create self imposed ones He was part of the Iron Blogger project (which fined you with $5 as a fine if you don´t blog), he applied self monetary incentives to improve his sleep schedule (donating $1 to charity each time he stay up after midnight), and he participated in a smoothie cleanse and a 10 day green smoothie challenge, during which time he had to drink at least one green smoothie a day and post a picture on Facebook as proof).
Smoothies are serious staff for David. He cares about eating healthy. During a mostly disappointing five hours flea market standing, and after dealing with some clients that he described as “obnoxious”, David still took the long way to pass the chips and grilled food only vendor and get some “reasonably healthy food to make it through the day”.
“Smoothies are pretty convenient, they are nutritional, I think there are lot of healthy benefits on them…I´ve been quiet doing a smoothie everyday, I try to put a lot of greens, to minimize the fruit. I like the taste of smoothies”. David Larochelle is also a vegetarian. But that´s not enough for him: “Lately, I´ve been trying to do things to improve my life, to do more exercise, I believe in spending time in being healthy”.
The morning we talked for this interview, David woke up at 6 am to exercise. He was ready at 7:30 am. “I find that if I don´t exercise in the morning it doesn´t happen. Or I just miss the money I payed for the Gym”
– Why do you think being healthy is so important?
“Because I think if I exercise, if I´m healthy, I´ll have more options in my life”. Then, he adds, “also, it´s a little bit sad but, the way our society works, I think if you´re in a better shape, people respect you more”.

Borja Echevarría, deputy managing editor of El Pais (photo courtesy of Echevarria's Twitter)

I was 15 minutes late to my meeting to interview Borja Echevarría de la Gándara, deputy managing editor of El Pais, Spain’s largest daily newspaper. Lucky for me, I found a smiling Borja sitting on one of the Media Lab’s plush couches. After a brief round of hellos, we started chatting and our conversation almost immediately went to newspapers when I asked Borja, currently a Neiman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation, about his research on the structural evolution of newsrooms and the effects of disruptive innovation on news business models.

Like so many news reporters, Borja started his career working the night desk at El Mundo in 1995. But unlike so many within our industry, this Bilbao-born former law student turned journalist quickly switched his attention toward the then emerging field of online news. A promotion from breaking news to society coverage to editor led to mixed emotions regarding his place in the newsroom. “I didn’t like being an editor so young,” said Borja.

Perhaps it was his age or perhaps it was just where the industry was headed but at some point in his career, Borja became fascinated by integrating online and print media and eventually left his post as online managing editor at El Mundo to help establish Soitu.es, a critically acclaimed online news startup. Co-founded with reporters and engineers from the newspaper, the experience transformed Borja’s approach to news. “I don’t like to think about things just online and in print, it’s not so much about platform—it’s about content.”

It also turns out that markets and the economy matter, too. Offering a fresh perspective in a sea of traditional Spanish media, Soitu.es won awards from the Society for News Design and the Online News Association. But innovation and accolades didn’t keep the news site from falling to the realities of the financial crisis. Two months shy of its second anniversary, BBVA, the site’s main financial investor, backed out and the site folded.

Like any startup founder worth his weight in salt, Borja was already onto cultivating his next journalist iteration before the dust had settled at Soitu.es. In 2010 he joined Spain’s largest daily as deputy managing editor bringing with him lessons from his experiences in traditional and experimental newsrooms: “If you try to change things just from online, you have to change the entire newsroom.”

And change the newsroom he has. Coming back to a daily newspaper hasn’t altered Borja’s embrace of cross-platform journalism. Along with a set of fresh ideas, Borja also brought his IT team from Soitu.es to El Pais. “If there’s any chance of survival…I think we need to combine tech, content and business,” Borja said of the future of the industry.

Of course, change does not happen over night. One of his first moves as head of El Pais was to change the morning news meeting time an hour earlier from 11 a.m. to 9 a.m. Borja knows that peak online traffic occurs in the morning and an earlier start time might make sense but the editor was sure to caution that change doesn’t happen overnight. “If I started my meetings at 8 a.m. my head would get cut off,” he joked.

Read Brett Anderson’s Storify about your classmate, a Berkman Center Researcher, Human Computer Interaction Scholar and Mamaliga Eater

For the interview assignment, I interviewed Erhardt Graeff. Below is an edited clip from the interview with Erhardt introducing himself and discussing his research interests, how he became interested in the area, his future plans, and why he is taking this class.

Interview Audio Clip

I also made a timeline with some of the events in Erhardt’s life. You can view this below or here.

“So why science journalism?” I ask Aviva as we walk through Harvard’s campus. Aviva’s mother was a veterinarian and, as a child, Aviva remembers seeing kidney stones and organs floating in her jar, while her grandfather was an organic chemist who captivated Aviva with experiments. Then she moves to journalism – she was the editor-in-chief of her high school newspaper and then her college newspaper at Union College. “It was my life for two years,” she says as she looks away, no doubt remembering the nights before the issue went to press.

So, I think, that’s what science writer is. But that clearly wasn’t the whole story. Developing a love for science and a love for media journalism didn’t have to necessarily lead Aviva to writing about science. Aviva is a prolific writer – her short pieces cover everything from wireless car charging to the origins of the great white shark. The subject of her writing is often technical and can be found in the all important peer-reviewed scientific journals, but her writing is not the glazed-eye, yawn inducing, regression-filled analysis of those mediums. As I researched Aviva and realized she wrote about science, I procured a rather large cup of coffee in order to hunker down and read her articles. I didn’t touch my coffee before I was finished reading through the first one, and then the second, and then…How did she do that?

So I had to ask her again, “Why science writing?” “I didn’t come to this as a dream of mine. It was a fortuitous marriage of some things that I love.” As a neuroscience major, Aviva was required to take a computer science class, which she put off as long as she could. After her first day of class, “I loved it, “ she said with her hands out reiterating her own shock.  She said she found herself in a 300-level class creating an interactive fiction engine for her college thesis – something she wouldn’t have known how to do just a year before. Two themes emerge as Aviva continues talking about the “fortuitous marriage:” First, she’s drawn to tangible objects, objects that she’s brought to life through her creative capacities; second, that the reigning image of a scientist is incorrect, and she wants to change that misperception.  The speech speeds up when she talks about holding her college newspaper in her hand. It’s easy to see that she’s picturing a copy of the Concordiensis, her school’s newspaper as she describes the manifestation of her imagination and work. To her second point, she talks about communicating technology and science to women, making it accessible to a group of people who think it’s not available to them. Her writing embodies this mission – she jumps from gray matter to the anatomy of a protein seamlessly and takes this layman along with her.

Aviva’s one year MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing comes to a close in three months. So, what’s next? She tells me over the winter holiday she lived with the widow of the subject of her graduate thesis, Paul Bach-y-rita, a pioneer in the field of neuroplasticity. Paul’s wife invited Aviva to live in their home for two weeks, giving her access to his unpublished manuscripts, full access to the contents of his computer, and even the songs he wrote about his wife. “It would be disappointing  to be read just by my advisor and mother,” Aviva says referring to her thesis. She hopes to do more justice to Paul’s life and the unprecedented access she’s received to his ground-breaking research. I look at her incredulously, and ask, “Okay, what else?” knowing there is more Aviva wants to do. That’s hard, she says, “I don’t know my brand.” “What do you mean?” I ask. She gives me an example: Ed Young looks for accuracy and holes in new stories, other writers are known for writing “obscenely fast” or for covering infectious disease.

“Okay, so let’s brainstorm,” I say.

This is the list we come up with:

Humanizing Science

Woman

Non-scientists

Lay audience

Simplifying

Accessible

De-mystify

Journalism

Stereotype.

She likes “Science,” but hates the word “Humanizing.” She changes her mind – Science is a scary word for too many people. So we finally settle on one.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present Aviva’s brand – at least for now.

After I had an incredibly interesting conversation with Catherine (i.e. “kanarinka”), I played around with the platform Zeega a bit and made this to share a few of the topics we discussed:

http://zeega.com/93086

Since it’s a fairly new platform, there may be a few glitches. But hopefully most of it works.