[UPDATED] White House AV Staff on Drugs … AND How to Watch the Obama Town Hall outside of Shanghai

[UPDATED: This post was originally intended as a public service to folks in China who don’t have access to a television broadcast of the Obama Town Hall. But then I spent the last hour listening to the boneheads in charge of the audio for the broadcast inadvertently beam their voices, f-bombs – and overall lack…

Interview: Monday Night Football’s Play-by-Play Man in China Airs it Out.

In American sports broadcasting, there’s no seat more coveted than one in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football, the thirty-nine-year old, once-per-week franchise for which ESPN pays US$1.1 billion per season. Over the years, it’s been home to some of the very best in American sports broadcasting (Al Michaels and John Madden most recently),…

New lows in expat advertising: no ugly ladies in the sud de France.

Of the many journalistic beats that Shanghai Scrap really wishes it could cover more fully, none is more tantalizing than the sometimes – nay, often – ridiculous state of expat-oriented advertising in China. It’s a marvelous arena, both in its own right, but also for the insights that it offers into how poorly Chinese companies…

Ghosts of the Machines – OR – Just where do all of those Chinese PCs go to die, anyway?

On August 28, Science, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, ran a news item regarding ongoing studies of the health effects caused by environmentally unsound processing of e-waste (PCs, monitors, printers, etc) in south China [subscriber only]. in part, the opening paragraph reads: China has been accepting vast quantities of discarded televisions, computers,…

Tweeting Urumqi

Despite the fact that Twitter is blocked in China, and the internet is completely shutdown in Xinjiang, a handful of foreign correspondents have managed to tweet real-time updates on events outs there – either directly, or via colleagues back in their bureaus. No doubt, newspapers and magazines will soon have stories about what has and…

US Expo 2010 Pavilion: When confirmation isn’t confirmation [Updated]

[UPDATE 7/3: Sure enough, this morning, Xinhua issued a new story, denying that the US had confirmed: “US participation in Shanghai World Expo Remains Unconfirmed.“] Earlier today, Chinese media (Xinhua) announced that the US will participate in Expo 2010, running a brief story entitled: “U.S. to participate in 2010 Shanghai 2010 World Expo.” Shortly thereafter,…

Beijing this, Beijing that … Just who is this [Mister] Beijing, anyway?

I may be in the minority here, but in my experience there’s enough subtlety and disagreement in even the simplest of government policy decisions, in any country, to remove any incentive for blaming said policy decisions on a specific city. For example, whether or not you agree or disagree with Barack Obama’s fiscal stimulus program,…