3 lessons for newspapers from the Edison Chen scandal
Feb 13, 2008
A scandal over nude photos of a romantically talented film star has had Hong Kong obsessed in recent weeks.
Edison Chen, we now know, has had numerous starlet girlfriends whom he liked to photograph naked. His highly “intimate” photo collection started turning up on the Internet several weeks ago after a computer repair shop allegedly copied his hard drive.
Even after an employee at the computer repair shop was taken into custody by the police, the photos still keep appearing on the web. Edison, who fled to North America, issued an apology via his blog and on a YouTube video that has been watched 400,000 times.
So far nine people have been arrested, with three have been formally charged, including a 24-year old man in Kowloon charged with publishing obscene materials after allegedly posting two files holding 100 photos. I am not sure how they tracked him down.
Naked photos of celebrities are newsworthy in Hong Kong in part because many of the starlets cultivate a wholesome image. In Taiwan, however, nude photo-related scandals are much more common for some reason.
Three lessons from the scandal for newspapers
1 – Readers will pay in order to get less
Edison Chen’s photos are spread across the Internet in uncensored form for free. Nonetheless, circulation has shot up for glossy magazines and newspapers that have been reprinting artfully censored versions of the photos. Thanks to Edison’s camera work, the Chinese New Year slowdown of circulation never happened.
Why do people are paying for censored photographs that they can see for free and uncensored online? Perhaps because they feel they are part of a community in reading it in a public forum such as a newspaper. Perhaps the format helps them sense the impact of what happened when seeing it in print. I wonder if such an event would drive publication sales in ten year’s time.
2 – Online army of reporters
As the flood of photos spread across the Internet, Hong Kong reporters scrambling to identify naked starlets were aided by online comments added to the pictures. Fans of the actresses managed to identify objects in the photos and even date the photos based on the style of haircut.
The wikipedia-style crowdsourcing of information (chart on right from Wikipedia) was nothing new, but reporters in Hong Kong publications found an interesting role in pulling together the findings in one place. This resulted not only in stories that drew on information from the Internet, but explanatory graphics with more information than a newsroom could possibly assemble in a short time. The journalists found their new role to be in collating and presenting information gathered online.
3 – Netizens unite! 
The aggressive police action against Internet users prompted several hundred to demonstrate on Sunday against selective enforcement of Hong Kong’s anti-pornography ordinance. This is the highest profile case of Hong Kong netizens taking to the streets for political action.
With the advent of User Generated Content, censorship becomes a highly personal attack on citizens by the government. This contrasts with censorship exercised through publications, of which readers are often unaware.
Governments and regulators of the world beware, censored netizens will be taking to the streets more frequently than the readers of censored newspapers.
Technorati Tags: China, Edison Chen, Hong Kong
Thomas Crampton was a correspondent for the
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