Bingfeng Teahouse

Zola, well-known for his on-site report of the Chongqing nailhouse case and the recent demonstration against Xiamen's PX project, was called as "China's first citizen reporter".

he recently visited Google office in Beijing to complain google's "improper handling" of the adsense placement on his site and confronted google's receptionist. Zola shot a video clip and put it on the web, which received quite lot of negative responses from chinese netizens. many accused Zola of "being crazy about fame" and "degenerating to Furong Jiejie".



zola has never covered up his strong desire for quick fame. in a separate post (in chinese), zola described how he was interviewed by an NBC crew, when asked if he regards himself as a citizen reporter, zola denied it and confessed that he only did it for fun.

when i tracked sources of the web coverage over the recent Xiamen PX case, i found that most of them trace back to a few people, namely Zola and LianYue (another blogger living in Xiamen). some domestic media did have independent research and reports but still, they were influenced by those few who control the right of discourse.

due to the high exposure on the web and the "independent" label of their reportings, they draw significant attentiono from overseas media and have a lot of referrals from them as well, as a result, overseas coverages over these issues naturally skewed to those "opinion leaders" like Zola.