I gave a speech at the Foreign Correspondents

I gave a speech last week (Sept. 17) to the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong, hosted by one of our new freelance regional editors and correspondents, Matt Driskill.

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To watch the video, click here or or click on the picture above.

HONG KONG – The Foreign Correspondents Club here is a throwback to the colonial era, an elegant building that dates back to 1917. It carries the weight of history and a colorful past of foreign correspondents who have come and gone through its doors and bellied up to the bar.

I gave a speech here today titled “International News in the Digital Age” as part of my tour of Asia trying to recruit correspondents for
Global News Enterprises
and wave the flag for our mission to radically redefine international reporting. Link to the speech here:

The history of foreign reporting is there on the walls of the club in black-and-white photographs by some of the best shooters in the world who captured history in Vietnam, Cambodia and then in Tienamen Square and during the handover from British to Chinese rule of Hong Kong. The club’s general manager, Gilbert Cheng, has worked there since 1972 and spoke of how the number of foreign correspondents has dwindled dramatically over the decades, and in the last decade in particular. In 1972 he estimated there were as many as 150 American foreign correspondents who worked full time for American news organizations who were members at the club. Today he said there are fewer than ten. Some of that has to do with the fact tht Hong Kong is not the same listening post that it once was. But most of the dwindling population of correspondents has to do with shifts in the industry and the hard economic realities — and misguided choices — of news organizations that have steadily eroded their international coverage.

One of the legends who is still around from the hey day here is Hugh Van Es. The legendary AP and UPI photographer was there tonight leaning against the bar. He took the famous 1975 image of the last Americans on a rooftop in Vietnam on the last chopper out of a war that was doomed. It is a stark statement of failure and hubris. Van Es, who is Dutch by birth, had nothing but contempt for the management of American news organizations that have killed their foreign bureaus.

“They are all accountants — bean counters who didn’t give a damn about the business,” he said.

And there in her reserved corner table was Claire Hollingworth, the legendary British foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph who covered World War II and Vietnam and everything in between. She is, by several estimates, over 100 years old. She famously broke the story of the German invasion of Poland simply by coming home late from a party one night and seeing German tanks lined up. She wrote about a life of reporting in her book, “Captain if Captured.” She was there tonight watching the BBC World news intently as she does on many nights. I asked her what was the difference between being a foreign correspondent today and 50 years ago. She said, “There was more freedom then.” I asked her if she meant governments like China were tougher on journalists now. And she shook her head and yelled in my ear, “It’s not the governments.” She is old and wise and not easy to understand. But I asked her who it was then who was restricting the freedom for foreign correspondents. “It’s just the business today,” she said in my ear.

If the FCC was steeped in the past, my next venue for public speaking — and planting the flag for Global News — was all about excitement for the future. It was a talk with the same title at the University of Hong Kong’s journalism department where I had a chance to meet with young students — many of them from mainland China. I was invited by Ying Chan, the director of the journalism program, and professor Gene Mustain. Both Ying and Gene were great reporters and great colleagues from the New York Daily News. The two of them ended up teaching here and have put together an ambitious and exciting journalism and media studies program. I could feel the energy of their students. They were inspiring, and you could sense the excitement they had about the future of journalism in the digital age. They get it. And they seem eager to hone their skills in multimedia editing and production which they will need to go out and tell great stories in the digital age. And, in the end of the day, telling great stories is what it’s all about.

HONG KONG – In the bleak morning light of my first full day here, the stock markets in Hong Kong and on mainland China began reeling the moment they opened. News of the Monday meltdown on Wall Street hit hard and hit fast.

Monday had been a banking holiday here, a day to worship ancestors. So while the crisis ensued in New York, the people of Hong Kong and China were taking a long weekend and celebrating the mid-harvest festival by lighting candles to remember the spirit of their loved ones who’ve passed on.

The lights could be seen flickering in lanterns in some homes the night before. But in the glaring light of this Tuesday morning, the future of Asia’s economy — the stunning collapse of two iconic firms on Wall Street — was in sharp focus. And it was the topic of just about every conversation in Hong Kong.

I am here to meet with our Asia editor Matt Driskill and to begin a recruitment drive of a dozen correspondents across Asia for Global News Enterprises, our new, web-based international news organization that is set to launch in January of next year.

Of course, it dawned on me that these are dark days for the global economy and that that may perhaps not bode well for our little start-up. We are a destination site, which means we will be a free site relying on on-line advertising as one of our key revenue streams.

Our concerns represent a drop in the ocean compared to the tidal wave of economic crisis sweeping the world, leaving thousands of people without jobs and tens of thousands more with uncertain futures. Jittery investors were left worried that if a firm as iconic as Lehman Brothers can fall, than anyone can. In the big picture, our concerns were miniscule.

But, like all entrepreneurs, I am tightly focused on what all this might mean for us. We are by global standards a small company with a business plan that calls for $10 million in investment. That will allow us to hire the team we need in Boston and 70 correspondents in 50 countries.

Approximately $8.5 million of that money is already raised, and we have a short list of other investors who are extremely interested in what we are doing. The short answer to the question of whether we should be worried, my co-founder and our CEO Phil Balboni, assured me is this: “We’ll be fine.”

“Of course, I’ve thought about it and we should think about it. But the truth is I am not worried. We are very fortunate to have solid individual investors who can withstand a downturn in the market,” added Balboni, calling me from our offices on the Boston waterfront.

And from an editorial standpoint, this turmoil in the world markets only seemed to underscore the urgency of our mission at Global News. With events like these, Americans need a new kind of web-based international news organization like ours that is seeking to build a stellar team of correspondents focused on global news and how the stories they cover are interconnected.

This is exactly the kind of crisis upon which we hope to shed light through our correspondents hard work as reporters and storytellers going out in the world to unravel the complex stories that affect us all. We will have stories that go deeper than the alternately dry and shrill and always pat standups of business reporters. They cover the economy like its a sports match with clear winners and losers when it is infinitely more complex and more layered.

Nothing proved the inter-connectedness of our global economy — the delicate economic web that holds us all together — than the news rocking the world markets.

As the markets opened, Matt Driskill and I headed for the office of the former Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China. We had scheduled a meeting with the former Chief Executive, Tung Chee Hwa, and as it turned out it was an interesting morning to hear his views on the economy and the future of China – US relations.

Bank of China in Hong Kong (Wikipedia Photo)

We climbed the stairs of the grand Colonial style building where he has his offices. Perched on a hill, its wide terrace once looked out at the harbor. But now the view is obstructed by the towering Bank of China and other shiny, new steel skyscrapers sprouting across Hong Kong.

At age 71, Mr. Tung Chee Hwa, or “C.H.,” as he is known by friends, has the grand bearing of a shipping tycoon which is exactly what he was before he got involved in politics and became the first Chief Executive of Hong Kong and was caught in the frothy cross-current of the 1997 handover from British rule to Chinese rule.

The SAR is an arrangement that was put in place to give Hong Kong limited autonomy and some independent governance from the central government in China. The balancing act between the central government and the unique and entrepreneurial spirit of Hong Kong has been more and more difficult to maintain in the decade since the Chinese took over.

Over a cup of Chinese tea, we jumped into the conversation by asking Mr. Tung about the economic turmoil on Wall Street and what it would mean for China.

“Export is very important for China. And so the bad news in America will definitely have an impact on China. The two economies are interconnected,” he said.

But he then carefully spelled out that they are less connected then they used to be, that China has carefully developed a domestic economy for its goods as well which is a balance of trade that is a big part of what makes it such a superpower.

“In the old days, they used to say when America sneezes, the world catches a cold… If you sneeze once now, well, it will be alright in the world economy … But you yourself America, don’t go catching a cold,” he said.

Very quickly, Mr. Tung offered a list of complex problems the US, China and the world are facing beyond the perils of the financial markets. He listed climate change, limited water resources, the spread of disease, the rising inequality in income across the world, the food crisis and energy demands.

“All of the issues we face are connected. The issues are really complex. We don’t have solutions immediately. We need to work together. We are in this thing together, the US and China. We need to work together to find the solutions,” he said.

He now heads up a new China-United States Foundation that seeks to promote better understanding between the two countries. He offered a long and candid assessment of China – U.S. relations, but explained that he prefers to keep a low profile and asked that most of it be on background. We agreed. And he promised to provide an in-depth interview with us down the road and Matt plans on following up on that.

After walking down the hill from the mansion, we went back to the hotel. There we met Anson Chan Fang On Sang. She is a woman whose elegance and sophistication and passion and love for order and the rule of law seems to embody the personality of Hong Kong.

She was eight years old when her parents moved from Shanghai in 1948 to Hong Kong. She was a member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong and before that was the head of Hong Kong’s civil service. She is out of politics these days, but still an active agent of reform and constantly challenging the status quo in the central government on mainland China and trying to help Hong Kong keep its edge, and some sense of its independence.

She too sees the chaos of Wall Street as directly connected to the economic health of China. But she saw something else that is not as openly discussed among the pundits analyzing the impact of the fallout in the stock market from the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

“There is a political impact to this in China as well,” she said.

She said the crisis occurs at a time when there are literally hundreds of small civil protests across China which go largely uncovered by the media. She says small villages are fed up with the collusion between government and big business.

She also cited the protests by outraged parents who lost their children in the earthquake. They have spoken out passionately about the corruption that led to the collapse of shoddily built schools and killed their children during the hurricane. She says if an economic downturn coincides with this unrest, that there could be an unpredictable result.

“This is inherently very destabilizing,” she said.

“These are very uncertain times,” she added.

We touched down at the international airport on Lan Tau island, and our regional editor for Asia, Matt Driskill, was there to pick me up. I knew it was him because it’s hard to miss a tall guy in a Panama hat and wire-rim glasses.

“Welcome to Hong Kong,” he said with a classic Oklahoma twang that still resonates in his voice even though he left his wind-swept home state more than 10 years ago to seek out a life in Asia as a foreign correspondent. He worked for years with the Asia edition of the International Herald Tribune and as a freelancer before joining us as regional editor and a columnist here in Hong Kong.

Matt has been invaluable in helping me plan this trip across Asia to recruit correspondents for Global News. I will begin the journey here in Hong Kong, then onto Beijing and Hanoi and Jakarta and Delhi where I will be meeting with dozens of journalists and government officials as we build our network of correspondents. And I’ll be keeping readers of this blog updated all along the way.

Our taxi whisked us out of the airport up and over the Tsing Yi bridge and then down through the Western Tunnel and then up and alongside the port past the scenic view of the cranes loading and off-loading containers. Finally, we descended down into the city shadows of skyscrapers that seemed too tall to fit on this small island.

I arrived at my room at the Conrad Hotel and turned on the TV and was immediately bombarded by staccato BBC and CNN broadcasts of the economic meltdown in Wall Street that had all gone down while I was flying in the silence across America and the Pacific. The broadcasters were breathless with the big headlines that the once-prodigious Lehman Bros. had declared bankruptcy, and the equally stunning news that Bank of America would take over another failing giant in investment banking, Merrill Lynch.

On the BBC, an economic analyst was comparing the events of this day to the 1929 crash that led to the Great Depression. And just when I thought it was typical British overstatement on the American economy, there on CNN was former Fed Reserve Chairman, the “maestro” himself, Alan Greenspan, calling the collapse of Lehman Bros “a once in a century event,” the worst thing he had ever seen in his long run holding the conductor’s baton of the America’s economy.

The reckoning for the American economy, it seems, had truly arrived.

You could immediately feel the full impact here of the US economic crisis on Wall Street even before the markets opened up in New York.

After 20 hours of flying, I cleaned up a bit and was invited to Matt’s home for dinner with his warm and charming French wife, Emmanuelle, and their 4-year-old son, Louis, at their pleasant home not far from the University of Hong Kong.

The talk this evening was of the economy. And about how we as a news organization would try to cover this story after we launch in January, how we could make our coverage stand apart from the breathless tone of the business reporters. How could you put it in a global context and offer our viewers a different perspective?

The sense of the global economy and how we are all inter-connected was alive and kicking in every conversation no matter how brief on this first day in Hong Kong. Even in the small-talk chat with a Hong Kong taxi driver on my way home, the discussion turned to Wall Street.

The cab driver who spoke with a thick accent, pronouncing the investment firm “Lay-MAN.” He offered this analysis: “You could feel it coming. Bad news for America and bad news for America’s stock market is bad news for the whole world. Wait. You see bad news tomorrow everywhere.”

Backing up the cab driver’s analysis was the news that the London stock market closed down sharply and more tremors were feared across the world. Already the Dow had tumbled 381 points by the time I went to bed.