Read Coffee Corner Picks: What Decentralized Media Looks Like: Data and Stories

Decentralized media is where independent individuals or small teams take on the responsibility of recording, writing, and reporting without any particular media agency employing journalists.

Traditional media is something most people are familiar with. A newspaper has different sections, such as local, international news, editorial, life, entertainment, or even horse classics. Radio or television also schedules different programs 24 hours a day. But what can we see outside certain media outlets?

This article selects two works to try to show the scale and half of the decentralized media.

@CourtLineThe Witness "The Third Anniversary of 612 - Data Analysis of Anti-Amendment Riot Cases - 814 People Accused - More than One Adult Was Underage at the Time of the Incident"

Court Line is made up of a group of former media reporters who visit Court News. They may be that the media they worked for has closed, or they may be resigning their previous work as a reporter. But starting in May of this year, they came together to form a team dedicated to visiting and reporting Hong Kong court news. They now publish a compilation of the day's court news almost daily. The selected articles above are the data reports written by their recent analysis and investigation.

" Buying Migrants " by @张晓晨: The author is an independent writer. She does not necessarily self-identify as a member of the decentralized media, but the stories she writes about small and medium-sized people in society reflect the face of the times. On the surface, this work is the story of a couple's entrepreneurial business, the story of a local small shop. But in the past three years, the reasons why customers came to her to buy biscuits have quietly changed fundamentally. The change in the customer's buying purpose also reflects the changes in Hong Kong society. And the boss's sentence "I hope that in the future customers will buy food for travel", I believe readers who care about Hong Kong will really feel mixed feelings when reading it.

Conscientious media organizations have collapsed, and the journalists and storytellers who previously worked for them have been forced to lose their jobs. But some of them are willing to do what they can to produce quality reporting, writing and documenting the era, after losing the umbrella of the media agency. The reason why I introduce these works is to hope that Hong Kong readers will not be discouraged for a long time because of the downfall of "Apple", "Stand", "Zhong" and other media. Since those journalists and independent writers are still persevering in difficult circumstances, supporting them and letting more people see them is an unavoidable responsibility of every reader who cares about society.