Cheng, who broke the Sars story in China, was imprisoned for five months in 2004, but never charged. He is banned from practising journalism and his ordeal has become a symbol of state censorship in the mainland.

But Roland Soong, who works for a media research firm in Hong Kong, thinks Cheng's words and ideas need to be heard. He said the full text of the speech Cheng was to deliver in Senegal wasn't printed either in the mainland or in Hong Kong.

So Soong published the full excerpts in his blog, North South East West.

He has done the same with other reports about Hong Kong and China, filling in the blanks in what he says is an attempt to bring more balance to the news.

Unlike archetypal bloggers, who often cite personal experiences as examples of oppression, Soong measures and analyzes the Chinese-language media.

His work is a consolidation of reporting with a central message: the media needs voices from everyone, no matter what their social level.

In Hong Kong, journalists and the public assume freedom of the press exists, but some bloggers and activists are not so sure.

They see the creeping hand of authoritarianism in the territory despite the fact that most experts say the press here remains substantially unfettered.

Hong Kong's press is too young and working in conditions that do not foster excellence, says long-time press freedom campaigner and RTHK journalist Mak Yin-ting, the honorary secretary of the Hong Kong Journalists Association.

The association has given an annual report of press freedom since 1993. In last year's report, called Beijing Turns the Screws: Freedom of Expression in Hong Kong Under Attack, the association blasted Hong Kong's media environment.

The troubles have not gone unnoticed by bloggers, or Internet journal writers, and blogs, or Web Logs, are now posing an unlikely grass-roots challenge to mainstream media here and elsewhere.

There are more than 50 Hong Kong-based blogs that run the gamut from personal to political, that are adding voice to a growing grassroots democracy movement that may be virtual in presence but very real in the belief it represents: that Hong Kong people should work together to form a civil society.

These local bloggers use art and essays to analyze and express con- ditions that they say indicate Hong Kong can develop into a democratic society that values open discussion of issues, universal suffrage and individual rights.

Many bloggers work like amateur journalists and researchers, working collectively in their individual spaces to scour the Web for their passions, whether politics, football, television game shows or food, and often share their information with thousands of other bloggers.

Bloggers who analyze Hong Kong's political system keep track of thousands of articles printed in local and international media, as well as writings on hundreds of blogs, to assess and interpret the direction of Hong Kong, both politically and socially.

Yan Sham-Shackleton, a blogger who writes largely about art, press freedom and the rise of calls for democracy in Hong Kong on her blog, Glutter(.org), realized first hand in March that not every voice gets heard in the reporting of significant events.

Sham-Shackleton, who was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was nominated for a ``Freedom of Expression Blogs Award'' by Reporters Without Borders, an international journalist advocacy group, in March, for the work she has done to highlight the younger generation's calls for change.

Soon after the nomination, she was interviewed on a local cable TV station for a story on blogging.

Before her interview, she asked the journalist and producers if they understood what she wrote about on her blog - democracy, the Basic Law and universal suffrage. They responded that they did - but the editing revealed something different.

Chinese-language reporters say that, generally, it is difficult to write about politically progressive ideas in their reporting.

Sham-Shackleton is probably the first known case of an individual who has experienced that difficulty first hand and who was able to write about it independently for an audience that watched the show.

``I talked a lot about the issues and [the reporter] asked me a lot about them as well,'' she wrote in a May 1 entry entitled Censorship/Self-Censorship. ``Every single mention I made about politics was duly removed. Every one.''

She was blunt in her criticism of what she says is going on in Hong Kong: ``Let's call a spade a spade. We should stop calling the sickness `self-censorship' and name it [by] what it really is - censorship.

``Frontline journalists seldom censor themselves. Their stories are usually killed by their superiors. It is plain old censorship. Chief editors, senior managers and publishers are doing dirty work for the government to water down criticisms or spike offensive stories,'' she wrote.

Sham-Shackleton was not the only one who was upset. Other bloggers who read about her experience teamed up in an email forum to create an online document to correct what they said were misconceptions about blogging.

That document can be found at http://hkbloggers.com/archives/blog-is-blog/blog-is-blog-english/.

So far, 47 bloggers have signed their names to an open letter to Hong Kong media and researchers complaining about the misrepresentation.

They feel that recent media stories about blogging have painted bloggers simply as individuals writing cute stories for their personal edification or amusement.

In fact, a number of bloggers raise social issues and write in detailed prose about media inadequacies. Soong, who linked his blog in the protest letter, says his blog tries to tackle the issues of media censorship objectively and in a different way to ``liberal'' bloggers.

During spare moments, he searches through the English and Chinese press for examples of how reporting leaves out critical news to inform his readers - 90 percent of whom come from China, he says.

``Government officials and big-time businessmen only have surrogates in newspapers and they don't have any presence in blogs,'' said Soong. ``Li Ka shing doesn't blog, Donald Tsang doesn't blog.''

He means that the Chinese editors use newspapers to bring the messages of these high-powered officials to the public, yet they rarely provide direct quotes from them.

Those powerful business interests could add their voices to this unbalanced media, he figures, if they could be convinced to blog. For now, Soong tries to even out the score.

In East South North West, Soong translates Chinese-language media and blogs into English to show the fuller story.

``I am being forced to increasingly say: `Let's look objectively at a particular event,''' said Soong.

``In a breaking news story in Asia, you will see everything compiled from Chinese sources,'' he claimed.

A recent example, he said, was reporting on Cheng's inability to accept the UNESCO award. Soong said that most media gave the story limited coverage.

``If you come to my blog, I'll have the whole thing translated,'' he said. As far as he knows, his is the only English blog to have done so.

Blogs used to appeal to only a limited audience with the time and patience to wade through the reams of information on the Web to find nuggets of information they really wanted.

Recent search tools and linking sites such as del.icio.us/, a ``bookmarks'' engine that links corresponding keywords and links to other searchers, and technorati.com, which does something similar, help bloggers and non-bloggers to find what they want faster.

Bloggers also use Really Simple, which embedded as code in their Web sites, automatically syndicates a Web site, allowing readers with a certain penchant for, say, politics in Samoa, or dentistry advances in the Dominican Republic, to be ``fed'' those sites and links that pertain to those subjects.

Essentially, blogs have begun to act, technically, like electronic reporters, sniffing out stories as they happen.

East South West North can be found at: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/weblog.htm

Glutter(.org) is at: www.glutter.org

doug.crets@singtaonewscorp.com