setting the bar for citizen journalism very high

I hesitate to link to this article on the same night that I posted my pathetic coverage of the local planning commission meeting, but apparently in some places citizen journalists are really creating positive change. Here’s a clip from a New York Times article on Chinese blogger, Li Xinde:

…He made a modest fortune selling Chinese medicine around the country, and now he’s started the Chinese Public Opinion Surveillance Net – one of four million blogs in China.

Mr. Li travels around China with an I.B.M. laptop and a digital camera, investigating cases of official wrongdoing. Then he writes about them on his Web site and skips town before the local authorities can arrest him…

All this underscores how the Internet is beginning to play the watchdog role in China that the press plays in the West. The Internet is also eroding the leadership’s monopoly on information and is complicating the traditional policy of “nei jin wai song” – cracking down at home while pretending to foreigners to be wide open.

I won’t comment on that part about the press playing the role of watchdog in the West except to say that according to a recent international survey the United States tied for 24th place when it came to the health of its independent media.