At 2:28 p.m. on May 12, a rare 8-magnitude earthquake jolted Sichuan Province in southwest China. Half an hour later a video of the quake shot by mobile phone was posted to one of China's biggest video-sharing websites, Tudou.com, by a university student in Chengdu, capital of the disaster-hit province. The video came minutes before the first TV news about the earthquake, which was run by CCTV News Channel, the first 24-hour national news channel in China.

"At first I felt my chair shaking and I thought it was my roommate who was kicking it. But later we realized it was an earthquake as the building was trembling and things on my desk began falling," said Zhao Zidong, a college student in Sichuan University. He was surfing the Internet in his dorm on the sixth floor of the building when the quake hit.

The two-minute earthquake video showed chaotic scenes as the quake hit the dorm, including a student hiding under a desk from which books, papers and plastic cups fell.

"It is 2:29 p.m. on May 12, 2008. We are having an earthquake here in the Sichuan University in Chengdu. Our building is still trembling," an excited voice said as the camera moved to a window from which dozens of students could be seen running away from the building.

As the earthquake calmed down Zhao began to upload the video to Tudou.com. That evening he found that his video had been played for some 600,000 times and was the most viewed that day.

Express themselves

In the Internet world, Zhao's homemade video was what is known as a podcast, a word that basically means blogging audio content but has been expanded in its connotation to include videos.

Topics covered by podcasts range from music and cultural programs, mainstream entertainment, business, politics, and science to travel programs. Podcasts are typically either person-centered or dedicated to specific topics.

n China, podcasting, which is hailed as a new medium, is dominated by video programs. China's various video-sharing websites have become the main stages for podcasters to express themselves.

"Thanks to the development of the Internet, more and more people have begun to use Internet or wireless tools to express themselves," said Ping Ke, who runs one of China's most renowned podcast websites, antiwave.net.

Chinese netizens' enthusiasm for expressing themselves was given fuel in 2005 when the country's first video-sharing website Tudou.com came into being. It has since grown into one of the world's largest content delivery networks, serving over 100 million videos each day with more than 40,000 new videos published daily, including amateur content such as videoblogging and user-generated videos, and professional content such as movie clips, TV clips and music videos. Tudou's motto is "Everyone is his own director."

"It is our faith as we believe that everyone's value comes from his creativity," said Gary Wang, founder and CEO of the website. "Podcasting differs from blogging in the way that it is more about showing oneself while blogging is focused on communication."

Truly creative and talented users often stand out. One such example was two college boys who gained fame for their lip sync videos to songs by the Backstreet Boys and other pop stars. The Back Dorm Boys, as they call themselves, captured themselves doing exaggerated lip syncs on a low-quality Web cam in their college dorm room. They completed their first video in March 2005 after much trial, and uploaded the finished video to the local network at their college. Other students liked the video so much that they began to spread the word about it.

While still at school, the Back Dorm Boys were signed as spokespeople for Motorola cell phones in China. They also signed a contract with Sina.com, one of the largest Chinese Internet portals. In 2006, they received The Best Podcaster Award from the portal.

The Back Dorm Boys (Image: Beijing Review)A few months before they graduated from Guangzhou Arts Institute in February 2006, the Back Dorm Boys signed a five-year contract with Taihe Rye, a talent management company in Beijing, to continue making lip sync videos. They also began studying singing, dancing, and stage arts with Taihe Rye.

The Back Dorm Boys also gained mainstream media attention in the United States thanks to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, helping to spawn countless parodies and imitators.
When asked to explain why in a sea of amateur videos they stood out, the two said, "The secret is: enjoy yourself and do what you like."

Grassroots reporters

"Your voice matters. Now, if you have something to say, you can be heard. You can make your own news. We all can." These words are from the book We the Media-Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by American author Dan Gillmor. Grassroots journalism, or citizen journalism, has begun to catch on in China as technology has improved, and especially thanks to fast and convenient Internet multimedia, including online photo and video sharing platforms.

Grassroots journalism first made an appearance in the so-called "greatest nail house" case in Chongqing, in March 2007. Nail house is a Chinese phrase that means households or persons who refuse to vacate their homes to make way for real estate development. The case rose rapidly to national fame as pictures of the house were spread around the Internet.

Netizens on two notable Chinese websites, Tianya and MOP, began following the case, using everything available to report from the scene.

Among the enthusiastic grassroots reporters was a young man called Zhou Shuguang, who later called himself China's first citizen journalist. Zhou wrote blog entries and posted video and still images on the Web. He achieved almost overnight fame and was acclaimed by fellow bloggers and interviewed by Chinese reporters and foreign journalists from Time magazine and Reuters.

Zhou reported on another influential news event in June 2007 when Xiamen citizens held a peaceful demonstration to oppose a chemical plant project, for fear of the pollution it would cause. Zhou was at the demonstration and sent regular live updates from his mobile phone to his Twitter webpage.

"Advanced technology and especially the Internet have greatly reduced the cost of news production and communication," Zhou told Beijing Review. Though he confessed that grassroots reporters are often poor in terms of their writing ability, he said they could often tell a story from a different and more intimate angle.

"I even draw my own conclusions in my reporting, which contradicts standard news reportage rules, but I think is allowed in personal coverage," Zhou said.

Zhou also went to the earthquake disaster zone as a volunteer for half a month during which he kept his blog rolling with updates consisting of words, photos and videos.

"They have the right to independently publish their reports, but the quality of their work cannot be guaranteed," said Zhao Zhili, a journalism researcher in Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences. "Grassroots journalism can be a supplement to the traditional media, though it is fractional, unverified and lacks depth," he added.