A notice board for our more than 400 members, who represent most of the world’s leading media organisations.
Foreign correspondents in a few bureaus in Beijng have recently discovered that their Gmail accounts had been hijacked. Their emails were being forwarded to a stranger’s address.
Here is how you can check if your Gmail has been compromised:
We remind all members that journalists in China have been particular targets of hacker attacks in the last two years. Please be very careful about what links you click on, what email attachments you open, and do run virus checks regularly.
If you have been hacked, please let the FCCC know at fcccadmin@gmail.com. We can help put you in touch with experts to run diagnostics.
Some things you can do generally to improve security:
The FCCC has received several reports that correspondents’ news assistants are being targeted with email viruses. The senders were purportedly from the media organisations’ head offices. We would like to advise extra caution when opening such email.
Here is one recent example:
From: Pam [mailto:pam.bourdon@yahoo.com]
Subject: Trip to BeijingPlease can you both confirm that you received this e-mail I sent a few days ago. Given recent e-mail problems I am worried that it has gone astray yet again.
Dear,
I am the economics editor of The Straits Times. I plan to be in Beijing October 2nd, (arriving late evening) to research the annual world economy survey.
I was suggested that you would be able to help me fix up some interviews.
I attach a list of people I would like to meet with. I would be happy with just 6-7 interviews during my stay, so don’t worry if some of them are away. If a lot of my chosen economists are unavailable, I will have a few more names.
I think that they are all Chinese speakers, but please check for me as I find that discussing technical economics through a translator does not work very well.I will be staying at the China World Hotel, No. 1 Jian Guo Men Wai Avenue .
From past experience, it would be good if meetings could be grouped to minimise getting stuck in bad traffic!The subject I am researching is the implications for the world economy, and in particular the developed economies, of the increasing
global importance of China, India and the other emerging economies. How is the increased weight in the world of emerging economies affecting growth rates, jobs, wages, profits, commodity prices, inflation, interest rates, asset prices, capital flows and exchange rates? Who will be the winners and losers in this new economy?Please let me know if you need any more information.
And thank you in advance for helping me arange my trip.Best regards
Pam
The FCCC has received many recent reports of pressure on Chinese news assistants and a general tightening of oversight on them, after several years of increasing freedom. We’d like to remind members that it is illegal under Chinese law for assistants to conduct “independent reporting.” Punishments for those assistants deemed to have overstepped the bounds have in the past ranged from warnings to detentions and a ban on working for foreign news organizations.
Please keep your assistants’ safety in mind when reporting and gathering news in China.
For more guidance on working with Chinese assistants, please see this section of the Reporters’ Guide.
FCCC Professional Committee
These are the results of the election for the 2009-2010 board, according to votes cast at the annual general meeting on June 11.
President: Scott McDonald (AP) – Canada
Vice President: Lucy Hornby (Thomson Reuters) – USA
Treasurer: Andrew Batson (Wall Street Journal) – USA
Secretary: Kathleen McLaughlin (BNA) – USA
General Board Positions:
Sim Chi Yin (Straits Times) – Singapore
Andreas Lorenz (Der Spiegel) – Germany
Francois Bougon (AFP) – France
Beniamino Natale (Ansa) – Italy
Ole Torp (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) – Norway
Associate Position:
Giorgio Magistrelli (Consultant to Embassy of Malta) – Italy
Many thanks to you for your support over the past year, and a big thank you to all of you who attended the AGM.
Old and new board members meet (L-R): Giorgio Magistrelli, Andrew Batson, Marga Zambrana, Jonathan Watts, Scott McDonald, Ole Top, Francois Bougon, Lucy Hornby, Andreas Lorenz, Chi Yin Sim, Kathleen McLaughlin, Beniamino Natale
Dear FCCC members,
You’ve probably noticed that the FCCC website now has a very different look and feel. This is the result of a project I’ve been working on for the last several months, to bring the FCCC website into the modern Internet era.
The old website had been pulled together basically by hand, and the accumulation of ad-hoc changes meant that it was requiring increasing amounts of time and effort to maintain and update. The new site is based on the widely-used WordPress blogging platform, so the way it works should seem pretty familiar to you all. It also has the benefit of being very easy for the board and the manager to update: statements and incident reports are going online much faster than before.
Essentially, the main benefit of the new site is that it can more easily link up with the rest of the online world. None of these features are that exceptional, but they were hard for the old site to handle.
For instance, you can easily use RSS readers to monitor new posts through the site’s feed: http://www.fccchina.org/feed/
And for those of you on Twitter, those updates also automatically feed into an FCCC account there: http://twitter.com/fccchina
One of our hopes for the site is that it will raise the FCCC’s profile by making it easier for people to find us online. So please link to FCCC statements and events on your own sites when you can!
There’s also been some updates to the content. We’ve got better links to other FCCs in Asia, and also to important reference information on Chinese government websites. The Reporters’ Guide we put out last year is now new and improved. Among other changes we now have an online English translation of the new reporting regulations available for reference.
There’s also an online form for confidentially reporting harassment.
And note the handy display of upcoming events at the top right of this and every page, to help you keep track of social events and speakers.
This For Members section will also give us a bigger platform to share job ads and other practical information. But from now on, please take note that any messages you want distributed to the membership may also be be posted online for anyone to read, unless you request otherwise.
Feel free to contact me directly if you have any suggestions, or would like to help us continue to maintain and improve the site.
Andrew Batson,
Webmaster
