Rebecca MacKinnon, AB '91, at the Literary Festival

Rebecca MacKinnon is a 2009 Open Society Fellow, writing a book tentatively titled Internet Freedom and Control: Lessons from China for the World. She is currently on leave from the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she has for the past two years taught online journalism and conducted research on the Internet, China and censorship.

Ms. MacKinnon co-founded Global Voices (globalvoicesonline.org), a global bloggers' network, in 2004. She is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative (globalnetworkinitiative.org), a corporate code of conduct for free expression and privacy. In 2007-08 she also served as Public Lead for Creative Commons Hong Kong (hk.creativecommons.org).

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Ms. MacKinnon worked for CNN in Northeast Asia for over a decade, serving as CNN's Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001 and as CNN's Tokyo Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 2001-03. She has also covered major news events in North and South Korea, Pakistan and the Philippines. After leaving CNN she received fellowships from the Shorenstein Center on Press and Public Policy and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, both at Harvard. She has been blogging about her ideas and work since 2004 at: rconversation.com

Bloggers: Should They Be Taken Seriously? -- From politics to dating, blogs are part of the literary world. Often derided as unedited ramblings, blogs can also be contemporary and thought-provoking. Should they be given more credence? Jeffrey Wasserstrom, founder of the China Beat blog, talks about the reasons why blogs are so important in today's society, how they affect free speech and privacy in China and what they mean for the future of journalism in this Internet age. In conversation with Rebecca MacKinnon