If you’re a close reader of IHT Rendezvous, you’re jonesing for a fix of Mark McDonald right about now. Our peripatetic Asia blogger’s last day writing was Wednesday. He’s moving on to other assignments. We’ll miss him.
Since Rendezvous launched in January, Asia has been one of the two main focuses of our coverage and our audience. Indeed, before the Great Firewall began the shutout of nearly all content from The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and Rendezvous, China was Rendezvous’ third country by audience — we had more readers only in the United States and Canada.
Moreover, China posts dominate our Top 20 most read and most commented on posts.
The driving force behind that coverage has been Mark McDonald. From Hong Kong, he produced some of our most commented on and most read posts of 2012. Here are our Asia Top 10 of 2012.
When Rendezvous launched, our goal was to connect and engage with intelligent readers with a passionate interest in global affairs. We aimed to host the International Herald Tribune’s corner of the global conversation taking place on the Web, reporting on things that mattered to those readers — and pointing to the best of others’ reporting on them: from politics and economics to sports and the arts.
Basically, what the IHT has been doing for 125 years.
Mark has been a crucial part of our success in curating our piece of the global conversation. His news acumen, developed over nearly half a century of reporting, editing and teaching, coupled with his take-no-prisoners analysis, have made the Web pages of Rendezvous both wondrously broad and deeply provoking.
He has authored many of our most trenchant posts and, without a doubt, sparked our most intense discussions. Whether writing about Jeremy Lin, the Chinese-American N.B.A. wonder, Chinese Web censorship, the true cost of U.S. military drone strikes, China’s high-pressure annual college entrance exam or natural disasters in the Philippines, Mark has engaged and enlightened readers.
Didi Kirsten Tatlow, an insightful and well-connected journalist based in Beijing will pick up where Mark left off. In her weekly contributions to Rendezvous, Didi has already demonstrated what she can do: from telling the harrowing story of how a reporter interviews a dissident to how mainland Chinese saw — literally — November’s historic Party Congress, from the stakes in the confrontation over the East China Sea islands to the personal side of raising children or buying a puppy in Beijing.
We can’t wait to see how she will deepen our understanding of China on a daily basis.
Mark will remain in the pages and Web pages of the IHT. And occasionally visiting us here on RDV. We’ll be following him. And I suspect many of you will be too.
IHT Rendezvous: How to Blog Asia for the MSM
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IHT Rendezvous: How to Blog Asia for the MSM
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IHT Rendezvous: How to Blog Asia for the MSM
