Rebecca MacKinnon

Rebecca MacKinnon is a research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. For more than ten years she reported for CNN in China and Japan, working her way up from assistant in the Beijing bureau to bureau chief in Beijing and Tokyo. She currently spearheads the Global Voices blog and posts at North Korea Zone and at her own personal blog, Rconversation.

Thomas Lang: Last year, you took a break from CNN to work on a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard, then resigned [from CNN] shortly thereafter. What prompted your decision not to go back to CNN?

Rebecca MacKinnon: Well, a couple of things. One was that over the year leading up to my resignation I had been growing increasingly frustrated with the direction CNN was going in. [I was] feeling that the … trend [toward] less interest in serious news was accelerating and the trend towards more infotainment, from anything but a war zone, was also accelerating. I’m neither a war correspondent nor an infotainment news bunny, and I was beginning to wonder whether there was any place for me in international news at the network.

So there was that general feeling that was buttressed by being told things by my boss like, “Your expertise is getting in the way of doing the kind of stories we want to see on CNN,” and “We’d like you cover the region more like a tourist.” That kind of thing that just made me increasingly question whether my job was any longer consistent with the reasons I’d gone into journalism — which was not to be an infotainment news bunny.

This leave had been planned for a long time because I’d been living in Asia since college — I was in China for nine years, I was in Japan for two and a half, I had been with CNN for most of that time, and I had been freelancing in Taiwan before that. So I thought it would be good to step back a little bit, take a break in the States to see what else was going on in the media space, and get some perspective on where I was going.

The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, which is attached to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, [has] these one semester visiting journalist appointments where you do some kind of research project that you write up. … I did my project on blogs and international news and what one could do with a blog related to international news that would be different than what one could do in a traditional reporting format. I started a blog focused on North Korea, which is called North Korea Zone, just to see what would be possible. It was a fascinating experiment and I got very excited with the potential of what some call participatory media … just the fact that its now very easy to create media with very little money that specialize in things that CNN audiences may or may not be interested in. There are a sufficient number of people out there who are [interested].

So I ended up deciding that this was as good as a time as any time to resign from CNN and try to figure out what I wanted to do next. The Berkman Center around that time offered me a fellowship to be a research fellow here this past academic year. … We recently started building a project called Global Voices which the Berkman Center has asked me to stick around another year to help build. [Global Voices] is a site to aggregate and index blogs from around the world and try to point to and filter and highlight what we think are the most interesting and noteworthy and perhaps newsworthy conversations, information, images, sounds, whatever, from grassroots media online from around the world.

TL: Do you see this project as a viable alternative to cable news?

RM: I don’t think mainstream media is going to go away. We aren’t trying to kill it. I think that there is just a much broader universe that has evolved. I think that there is still a tremendous audience for cable TV. Most people don’t have the time to troll the Web or don’t have the technological wherewithal or bandwidth. [People] just get home after a long day, they want to veg out in front of the TV for 30 minutes, figure out what the news is, and then watch the football game. That’s great. But there are a lot of other people who are frustrated with their inability to get what they want, and that’s what we hope the site will provide.

We’re also already finding that journalists are finding the site useful as a way to get information from countries where their news organization doesn’t have a bureau.

TL: Are you ever concerned about the accuracy of the blogs you are linking? Or do you just let the reader determine accuracy?

RM: We’re letting the reader determine [accuracy]. We don’t have the resources to go through and vet and fact-check [the postings]. As with all information online and in the traditional media, caveat emptor — don’t believe anything you watch, read, or hear until that source has earned your trust. That is definitely the case with any blog. What we’re doing is pointing to things. Over time we are going to try to be gathering more information about who some of these people are that we point to a lot, and try to make that available. …