Michael Zhao's "Clearing the Air" Monitors Air Quality in Beijing

July 22, 2009

AAJA member Michael Zhao, the managing editor/producer of China Green, Asia Society, was one of several National Journalism Awards winners. His piece, 'Clearing the Air: China's Environmental Challenge,' which Zhao described as "an elegantly designed montage of major visual aspects of Beijing's air pollution," won in the online-unlimited subject matter category. Zhao was conceptual developer for the project. The awards will be presented Aug. 15 at the AAJA National Convention in Boston during the Gala Scholarships and Awards Banquet.

Zhao said "'Clearing the Air' shows the 2008 Olympics host city's air quality on a daily basis thanks to a friend's diligent photography work from Beijing. The mini-site also presents a short video that highlights the city's environmental challenge that has triggered world wide concern as Beijing geared up for the largest sporting event in history and in the country."

He explained how the project started and the process which led to its development.

"I got hired by my former dean Orville Schell from the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism when he moved to New York to head up a new Center on U.S.-China Relations. He asked me on board to create a multimedia site that pools together a series of visual stories about China and its environment, which also covers energy and climate change. And I had an idea before moving to New York, which was documenting Beijing's air quality on a daily basis via a friend's help in Beijing. That was a year and half before Olympics but there were already quite a lot of concern over Beijing's air pollution. From late 2007, our Center started working out a presentation with Asia Society Online colleagues and we spent the next few months designing the site and pulling all the images and data together into this presentation. I was the visual conceptualization pioneer and we hired a web developer outhouse to do the major programming and web design. You can see my version of how I envisioned this project here: http://beijingair.michaelzhao.net.

"So we launched in late July right before the Games and it become quite a real-time watchdog over Beijing's skyline and its air quality. It still has more than 150 daily visitors even a year after the Games. And we are very happy with the feedback and following it has generated about the issue."