 Let me now head over to to Brian. Hi, ready. So thanks again for the invite to be here. It's great being here at the Taiwan Summer School again. So it was a great gathering of so many interesting people. So I think I'll talk today a bit starting from method or writing style and move over to kind of larger framework issues. I think these kind of points are related. So a bit about a new bloom was founded in 2014. Among people that participate in the Sunfire Group, a lot of us were a part of efforts to spread awareness about Taiwan to make sure the world was aware of this movement. And so that shaped a lot of kind of our earlier writing in the sense that a lot was aimed in form to clarify misunderstandings about Taiwan and to engage in dialogue with the international world. That being said, also, none of us were actually journalists. We were actually mostly people with students in graduate school, a lot of MA students. I myself had no background in journalism before a new bloom. And so actually that new bloom became actually a media outlet is somewhat surprising to me. Media outlet organization, whatever you want to call it, in the sense that most was an academic background. We were aiming to inform in this sense and so forth. But I think that a lot of what we shared was a frustration with both academia and journalism. Academia sometimes does seem overly narrow. It seems like you're talking to the same set of people over and over again, people that have a kind of meta language. They already know what you're talking about. You can assume a certain set of knowledge or understanding or framework, which you don't have with a general audience. However, that being said, with news reporting, it's often quite shallow in the sense that you have boilerplate text always being repeated over and over again. The most infamous being Taiwan is a Renegade province and what have you for any figure you have to kind of simplify them into one or two sentences. And a lot is just very repetitive or just kind of fades out day in and day out. It's very difficult for a news article to stand in within its time, but also outside of it. A lot of news reports are just a news report about what happened that day and you forget about it. And maybe it's cited somewhere, but it's only remembered. It's not really something that people come back to. And the other frustration is that particularly because of Taiwan's marginality in the world, having a surface level or shallow information could actually be dangerous to Taiwan. For us with our background in the Sunfire movement, that's what we saw because international perception of the movement could prove dangerous actually. It would have a concrete political effect here. And so I think that even for our members as academics or people that later sort of became involved in development this way, we were kind of hoping to intervene in that way. And so a lot of different categories of articles we had our news reports, but also commentaries, polemics, injecting some kind of trying to try to inject some kind of point into the discourse and so forth for us as well because we were originally entirely bilingual that the Chinese language section kind of shrunk as Taiwan on and English section became larger because of the fact that there's already a lot of Chinese language discourse about Taiwan, but there's less English language discourse that also kind of changed things. We were really hoping to conduct dialogues back and forth between English and Chinese and so challenged. I think that I'll talk about this a bit later that really affects I think the way we write about Taiwan. And so in terms of style often as a new bloom, I think of it as trying to be somewhere between academic journal and journalism. It's not the articles are above 700 words. Usually we actually have no upper length in articles. So we've had some monsters before pieces that are above 10,000 words even like 30,000 words. There's a few pieces are like 30,000 words. Sometimes at one point someone tried to submit a is like 70 to 80,000 words. I think that we actually had to break it up into like three articles. I don't know if anyone read it and it was very clearly an MA thesis other times. We actually have submissions which are pretty clearly just undergraduate papers, which is also fine, but sometimes you do get the submission with the kind of genre of submission, which is like a basic point about Taiwan's like, well, I'm going to explain these very basic facts about Taiwan or just some issue about Taiwan. It doesn't really fit in a Taiwan specific publication because we presume a certain amount of knowledge about Taiwan in our readers. And so it's kind of dealing with these different kind of categories of submission and we try to hope to find a balance between that at the same time. I think a lot of times because of our frustration with these frameworks that academic writing needs to be within certain parameters to be published as you get circulation that journalistic writing is again shallow, but also you have these word like limits, which are incredibly short, I think for, particularly for academics. And so we really did want to be open to kind of experimental forms of writing much longer pieces than usual. We didn't, we don't have an article length limit because of that, though we do hope to have something that is not as long, but then can still have a deeper discussion of something. And so the way I often think about it is not reducing a point into something that's more simple or generalizing. It's having something that's almost like a zip file. It's like something that you can unfold and take different pieces of it and look into further because just if this piece contains access to other parts of information or links or points to different discourse, you can kind of learn much more through that. In that sense, I think that that's not really simplifying, but it allows for further exploration beyond what you can do in a single piece. In that sense, you know, I think it's, it's again trying to find the sort of balance particularly for us when we were started. That was in 2014. That was two, three years after Occupy Wall Street, which in New York at the time saw the launch of a number of publications. Like Jacobin Magazine is probably the most famous, but then also New Inquiry and plus one and so forth. And these were publications that claimed in their kind of mission statement to have a similar aim to push for discourse, political discourse, also to kind of not exactly be academic. A lot of the staff members were graduate students primarily, but then also be kind of journalistic in that way. And so we're kind of hoping for that. I think in general, when we look at writing, for example, a book I really like is The Last Intellectuals by Russell Jacobi pointing towards like the decline of this kind of general intellectual, someone that was oftentimes a expert in their field, but would also publicly engage, would write for a general audience who would draw on their expertise to build legitimacy in that sense, to be able to talk credibly about other issues that are directly related to their field of study, but also sometimes tangentially. I mean, I think that in Taiwan, you do actually have this more of this tradition of the public intellectual that's still alive. But I think that in other parts of the world, you've kind of seen this narrow specialization within academia, where you research more and more narrow topics. And it's kind of harder to talk about these larger framework issues or to just engage with public. I think even academia, there's a sometimes disdain of public engagement, which is something that I think we were trying to push against because for us, because we were primarily, I think, coping to influence the world as in our background, because our background is all being activists and so forth, having kind of articles that were just being read by very few people in a journal behind a paywall by maybe only the other researchers in that field. That was a bit frustrating to us. We felt it was overly narrow. At the same time, then we didn't want to kind of just appeal to the general audience that in a way that really simplified or depicted Taiwan in a way that is somewhat misleading. And so then we were trying to find a balance and that was the challenge. But I think that there's actually not a lot of precedence for this. And so we were actually trying to be experimental. That's why eventually we tried to kind of expand our horizons. Recently, for example, we launched a kind of arts and culture publication to have more focus on that, but also to allow for maybe even combinations of subjective and objective writing. Because I think Sam brought up the point earlier of what is objective. And this is actually a discussion we had early on. Do we actually believe in objectivity in the sense that we do view there's an objective kind of a thing that we're reporting on, which is social phenomenon in Taiwan or what happens in Taiwan. But we also have our own ideology and viewpoints and thoughts. And we thought that actually that's true of anybody. And so we want to be more honest about that to allow people to kind of take it or leave it. They know what we think. We don't aim towards this kind of false sense of objectivity to have it out there for people. And so that's kind of one of the decisions that we settled on pretty early on. I mean, I was actually, as I mentioned, I was a little surprised that people started calling me a journalist as I went on in the beginning, actually just thought of myself as more in ideologue more than anything else. So then to move to some of these structural issues, and I think the challenge of writing on Taiwan in English is that there simply is not a lot of writing on Taiwan in English. I think that daily the amount of writing that's produced on websites, new sites, so forth, I could probably still read that all in one day. I don't think that knowledge production in the media sphere about Taiwan is yet large enough that and so you cannot conceivably read more that that all was produced within one day. And so I'm always kind of trying to read the discourse and be aware of that. But then in that sense, then there's only so many places to be published. There's only so many platforms and that also can lead to some frustrations. There are academic platforms such as Taiwan Insight and other kind of blogs that are more and focused on public engagement. But I think also what's interesting is that because there's such a lack of writing on Taiwan in general in English is that academic research on Taiwan can sometimes be actually journalistic in a way, this kind of knowledge about something would not exist otherwise or be in print in English, except for that academia provides a space to write about. I think the nice thing about academia for some of the criticism I've had of academia is that it provides a space that is somewhat insulated from Saudi to allow for knowledge production. It doesn't need to be instrumental sometimes in terms of the use value of producers or so forth. But in that sense, then you have a small group of smaller outlets, for example, New William or Catalan Media are the kind of main active ones now. You have one kind of intermediate outlets, which is I mean, I'm talking about text only, New Zealand's, which is the English language section of a larger Chinese language platform. And then you have the kind of bigger fish in the pond who are Taipei Times, Focus Taiwan and Taiwan News. The thing is that these are the only outlets capable of producing several dozen articles on Taiwan in English. And so a disproportionate amount of citations or news reporting comes through these. That can have some issues. I mean, particularly I have some issues with some of these larger tier publications regarding fact-checking or sensationalist content. However, then that's the thing though, these smaller outlets sometimes are still dependent on these larger outlets. And I think that even in terms of academia, just looking at the citations and where we gather knowledge, a lot actually does come from journalism in that sense. And so I think that that is one of the challenges that there's only so much space in the English language world. When you look at these larger outlets, I mean, New William is tiny. Actually, New William and Catalan, the thing about these tiny outlets is that these are the ones that are somewhat focused on English at this point. Whereas with the other outlets, these are all the English language sections of larger Chinese media platforms. That also stands the risk that because of the fact they're seen as peripheral and not as important, these outlets will periodically see if staff being cut or they themselves could possibly be accessed at some point. And so in that sense, I think just English language writing on Taiwan is in itself somewhat precarious. And so for us, we were trying to create kind of our own platform because we felt that what we saw was not something that was out there currently. But there's also I think the possibility that, you know, just with these larger outlets, I mean, we are still dependent on them in some way for all of us writing on Taiwan in English. And that's kind of a challenge in that sense. So I think that points to some of these kind of questions going forward quickly for the English language media ecosystem or the knowledge production ecosystem. In the past few years, we've seen the expansion of different media on Taiwan. I mean, for example, Gose Island Media is a great example because just now we have podcasts on Taiwan. We don't have that before in the past. There's just a lack of podcasts in general, whether in English or otherwise. I think in the future would be nice, for example, if there's much more video content being produced about Taiwan, because that's something that's also lacking. I think just in terms of other media, that's also something that could be bolstered because I think in that sense, whether journalism or academia, the way I think about it, it's all part of this larger discourse about Taiwan or this kind of knowledge production ecosystem. And so it's actually oftentimes interactive. I think just having different, for example, websites such as Taiwan Insider, platforms like Gose Island Media and just more diversity in viewpoints and platforms that publish different kinds of content, that all benefits us in some way. We all kind of contribute towards this together in that sense. And so I think that that's one of the challenges about just public scholarship in the present, that there's such a limited amount of platforms. And so I particularly hope to see more in the future going forward. And so I'll be looking for discussing further with people later on. Thanks. Fantastic. Thanks for that, Brian. I mean, one of the things we've been talking about recently is this idea of a golden age of Taiwan studies. And we're in the academic circles with many thinking about this through the lens of more academic publications, journals. But I think if we look at it from a slightly different angle, it's such an exciting time. There's so much material out there that we didn't have, even if we go back 20 years when, for example, Taipei Times first emerges, the limitations in terms of media data. Even though you've made the argument that there's only a limited number of platforms, but compared to the past, it's really exciting time.