China Media Centre 2015 Winter Seminar – “Just write what you’ve seen”: the BBC and its China coverage

Speaker: Mr Vincent Ni

Chair: Dr David Feng

Open to all

The BBC is widely known as a major player in the world media, also offering services in Chinese. Its in-depth reporting and a “just write what you’ve seen” commitment to coverage means it includes content and people that the official Beijing news sources tend to shy away from. There remains an equal amount of misunderstanding, conflict, and news coverage gap between the BBC and China-based official media. Vincent Ni will be discussing these issues further, sharing first-hand experience, and giving advice to students seeking to enter the world of journalism.

Vincent Weifeng Ni is a senior producer at the BBC World Service, who has just recently covered the historic election in Myanmar. He appears on BBC Chinese, World Service radio, and BBC World TV, and is now also a fellow at the RSA. Until 2014, he was a foreign correspondent for Caixin Media. At Caixin, he served as its correspondent in Washington, New York, Cairo, and London. Ni covered the 2012 US general election and extensively reported on the debt crises in Europe from London, Berlin, and France.

During the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011, Ni was one of the very few Chinese journalists reporting from Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In November 2011, with a colleague Ni won a runner-up place in the London Foreign Press Association’s annual awards in the category Financial / Economic Story of the Year. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of Oxford, where he was the recipient of the Hoare Family / China-Oxford Scholarship in the field of Social Science. He was also the China Fellow at Columbia Journalism School in 2012-13.

If you have any inquiries about CMC events, please contact Alja Kranjec at a.kranjec@westminster.ac.uk.