But it’s a good read. Most importantly, there’s no bull shit.

I am a trained breaking news reporter. At DNAinfo, we were constantly updating our website – I staked out murder scenes, chased fire trucks, rushed to press conferences in Chinatown, and sat through community board meetings that went past midnight (which then meant I got home at 1 a.m. and had lots of coffee as I wrote my stories in the wee morning hours).

This half year, a departure from all that. I’ve been transitioning to long-form reporting – something I’ve wanted to do for awhile – with an emphasis on (of course) China and news analysis. My latest story is one of the first pieces I’m really proud of.

Breaking news serves a purpose. It’s very practical. People need to know what is happening, and they need to know it NOW. Whatever is happening at the 14th Street subway station could affect your commute home. That murder down the block from your house? You want to know if your family is safe.

But there’s another aspect of breaking news that I’m not so fond of. Journalists – and their readers – are always looking for trends, patterns, some way or some expert to explain WHY things are happening. Often, because of tight deadlines and a rush to come up with an explanation, speculation trumps fact and a simple answer is always favoured over the complex, but more accurate one.

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, has written about this. He calls it the “narrative fallacy” which is a fancy way of saying the news media takes the facts at hand and weaves together a story line that either a) they think readers/viewers want to hear or b) reinforces the reporter/editor’s point of view.

International or not, all breaking news reporters – this one included – are guilty of this. Even magazine journalists can make such mistakes – Maclean’s magazine’s “Too Asian” story is a recent, ripe example.

Taleb writes in his book:

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly the newspaper cannot perform an experiment, but it can choose one report over another – there is plenty of empirical research to present and interpret from … Being empirical does not mean running a laboratory in one’s basement: it is just a mind-set that favors a certain class of knowledge over others. I do not forbid myself from using the world cause, but the causes I discuss are either bold speculations (presented as such) or the results of experiments, not stories.

So with my most recent piece on China’s scientific publishing industry – and in a forthcoming analysis on China’s mental health problems, I am steering clear of narrative fallacies and striving to produce more analytical stories, backed up not by anecdotes but by empirical research. But empirical research takes time, you see. It’s not something a political scientist, doctor or economist can always drum up in time for a reporter’s deadline.

These days, this reporter is enjoying a more flexible deadline. The result, I hope, is for a better, a smarter and a more accurate story for you, dear readers.

What are people reading? Well, a lot about food. Some of the most popular hits are on my “Best Cheung Fun in Chinatown” post, where someone linked my review to a board on Chowhound.com. Another biggie is the “Story Behind the Story” regarding FRIED DOUGH. But of course. It was a commentary + outtakes kind of post, because so much color didn’t get into my AP story about Canadian doughnut chain Tim Hortons entering the New York City market.

Because I’m particularly interested in immigration and migration of the Chinese, a German filmmaker recently wrote me asking if I could meet him for coffee to talk. I don’t know how much I can help him, but I told him I’d be happy to talk about my research going on in Zhejiang province at the moment, as well as my Masters thesis work I did in Brooklyn with Fujianese immigrants.

And then there was that time when I blogged about the plight of some domestic helpers from Indonesia and the Phillipines as they painstakingly leave their families behind to find work in places like Hong Kong, Dubai and Singapore. Shortly after publishing that post, I received an e-mail from a woman in New York asking if I knew of any Filipino nannies available for hire in Manhattan with a valid driver’s license.

Yes. I get some strange requests sometimes.

At the end of the summer, an editor at Verge Magazine contacted me, wanting to write a little review of my blog for their September issue. Verge is a Canadian magazine (distributed across North America) aimed at young people interested in working, studying or traveling abroad.

Needless to say, I’m glad to see that people are reading! Keep on visiting, leaving comments and writing in.

Click here to see full-page spread of magazine.

An interesting report from TIME.com:

I had approached the follically-challenged, bespectacled man sitting on the brown, wooden bench on a Lower Manhattan subway platform, thinking he might make a good interview.

Admittedly (and I admitted this to the man himself), the story I was nosing around about, was a light-hearted piece about…cats. It’s not hard hitting journalism and I never pretended it was.

So while I was taken aback by his rudeness and his seriously skewed view that there are “commies” in the White House, one thing struck me after this encounter: he was right about one thing.

What am I writing about and why?

Do we, the journalists, have the responsibility to write what the public wants to read? Or is it our written word that shapes the appetite for news?

There are times I am inspired by what I believe to be a journalist’s calling to shape public opinion, and to steer the public into thinking, reacting and caring about important issues.

But in a world where headlines announcing Brittany Murphy’s death trump news that Democrats have secured enough votes to pass health care reform, I sometimes lose a little faith. You want more readers to surf to your site, to pay for your paper, to subscribe to your magazine… so how do you strike a balance between hard and soft news? Between what’s easy to digest and what might be harder to swallow?