No News Is... Frustrating

When you travel or live abroad it's often difficult to stay abreast of current events both globally and locally.  Living in China, I've found that the media here is often censored to the point that even significant local events are more public to the global audience than they are on the ground here.  For example, I didn't hear about the riots in Kunming over the continually strained interactions between police forces and street vendors (read about it in The Economist) a couple months back until a friend in Boston asked me if I was okay.

While I use a paid VPN service to access the outside world without censorship, I still can't help but feel disconnected sometimes.  In college, I used to get up early on occasion and sit in a cafe, reading the NY Times or the Wall Street Journal.  There's just something about flipping through the news.  That's why, when I was in Cambodia earlier this year, I was so excited to see a vendor in a bus station in Phnom Penh selling print copies of The Cambodia Daily--an English and Khmer-language paper containing local and international articles taken from popular media sources.

Though there are several sources for English language news in China, including the China Daily, uncensored world and popular news is hard to come by.  For that reason, I've become partial to Google's FastFlip, which allows you to "flip" through images of different news articles and blogs, browsing the news almost like you'd tend to do with a newspaper.  You can browse different topic-themed "sections" or just read the popular news (which tends to be slightly tech oriented due to the types of people who probably know about and use the service).

Even if you're not as remote or starved for news as I am, FastFlip is still an innovative and effective way to absorb the news.  It's certainly worth a look!

[In other news, I'll be heading up to Luquan County, north of Kunming, this week to continue my research with the second target dialect of Yi.  I'll try to write a post when I get back about my trip and what my research entails.]