Among the Chinese diaspora in the world, we have just bade farewell to the Hungry Ghost month.
That’s the period when underworld spirits supposedly come out to roam our world and it’s not considered an auspicious time to travel far, go out at night, let alone launch a new business venture.
As a spirit-fearing Chinese – who isn’t these days in a world when real money has proven to have as much value as the paper money we burn at funerals and other religious ceremonies – the launch of TNooz thus comes at an auspicious time.
The Hungry Ghosts have departed for yet another year and the Festival of Lights – the Indian new year – is upon us.
I welcome the idea behind TNooz. The name, well, one man’s nooz is another woman’s news and I suspect competitors will probably have fun with it – “TNooz – news to make you snooze”, for example.
But the idea to create “a new, dynamic, global media brand for the travel industry” which will focus on travel technology is a good one and while it will be driven by a core team of two at the start, supporting it will be a team of contributors/volunteers, including yours truly, from around the world.
In this way, through social collaboration with the world’s leading pundits in this space, it hopes to deliver a global media platform for travel technology news and issues. I am delighted to be part of the TNooz’ honour roll.
For whatever you say about how new technology has brought down the walls between journalists and bloggers and everyone can be a writer these days – and yes, it was Twitter that delivered the first report of the Jakarta bomb blast and not the general media like CNN – there is still a distinction to be made between those who analyse and those who tweet and blog.
As Roger Cohen notes in his column in the International Herald Tribune – and I paraphrase his quote – “Journalism is distillation. A choice of material, in words or images, made in pursuit of presenting the truest and fairest, most vivid and complete representation of a situation.”
And in today’s world where everyone has access to weapons of mass communication, it is even more important to have those who distill information and not just put out more information for the sake of putting out more information.
It is what we try to do at and with this collaboration, we hope TNooz will give the industry a global, common voice, advance industry knowledge and provoke thought leadership, without a hidden agenda or overly hungry men trying to hijack a good idea.