Deadspin in Beijing

Three young college grads asked Deadspin if the web site wanted the trio to cover the Beijing Olympics. Deadspin said yes. And the rest is not history, seeing the Olympics are still going on, but Mediabistro.com does write about three budding journalist. Okay, that's the Reader's Digest condense version. (By the way, does anyone even read the Reader's Digest to get that previous attempt at humor?) All three graduated from New York University in 2007. All are single. One from Poconos, Pennsylvania. Another from New York City. The last, which is the only one with a journalism degree, is from Des Moines, Iowa. All, like many of us bloggers, are anonymous. The three are now called "Deadspin Beijing Bureau." Unclear whether they answer the phone that way.

What they are attempting to do is succinctly told by "Correspondent #2," the journalism major: "We want to provide Deadspin viewers with the Olympics from a local, street-level perspective. That means we'll be doing stories that people who are up-to-date with the news from China won't see anywhere else. We definitely get a lot of good stories from established news providers, but these are stories that do away with the cliché themes -- like how China's booming cities are a boiling point for Eastern and Western values or pollution, for that matter. Pollution is definitely a newsworthy thing to write about, considering China promised to have its air cleaned up for the games, but everyone knows about China's struggle with the environment. And God knows China's government did stress over this and put a lot of effort into fixing it. I would like for the games to go smoothly, believe it or not. This doesn't mean that I want our stories to be soft or without the grime, though."