The Electric Rice Cooker

Cooking the grains. Cedric Sam's blog on hybridizations of storytelling, design and technology.

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This graphics package on the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge is pretty much my swan song at the South China Morning Post! It was an exciting two years of learning and experimenting, fulfiling a childhood dream to work for Hong Kong's English newspaper. This project encompasses many of the new techniques and technology learned in the last few months, including processing Landsat satellite imagery, ai2html, ArchieML and Illustrator (!). It couldn't have been done without the generous contribution of my dear colleagues of all desks (like for any project done at the Post so far). For that I'm infinitely grateful.

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Taking stuff apart: “Greenland Is Melting Away”

Great maps and great video/photo interactive on the alarming melting of Greenland. I was curious how the zooming effect was executed. So I fired the Developer Tools. First, I went in with the element selector on the zooming maps. Turns out it's a canvas tag! Then, I stumbled a bit to find how the imagery was rendered, until I remembered to check my Network tab. So it turns out that there's a succession of images that get loaded to your browser, from a map of Greenland in its context to an image of the scientists' camp. The images even seem quite optimized / reduced in quality (to around 300 K each), probably to make sure it loads quickly when a reader scrolls to that part of the interactive feature. I guess that how each "frame" melts into the next is a play on the opacity of the image, but I didn't identify the code. Judging from the URL structure, there's probably different versions of the images for different screen sizes. It's very nicely done, as always, from NYT Graphics.

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Taking stuff apart: “How ISIS Expands”, a simple multi-platform graphic story

Great technology allows for great storytelling, which seems to be the motto for the always excellent NYT Graphics team. In their newest graphic, How ISIS Expands (Hannah Fairfield, Tim Wallace and Derek Watkins), the Times looks at strategies of ISIS' expansion, published on the day the ancient city of Palmyra fell. One of the great technologies underlying each project at the NYT: ai2html. Since March 5, the Illustrator script was made available to the public. What it does is convert AI files directly to HTML, which I've described last summer before actually seeing and using the script (some guy even went as far as creating his version of it, which of course doesn't handle all the options the NYT ai2html has). Again, you need to know how to use it, and for that is another challenge for every modern graphics desk in media organisations. When integrated well into your workflow, it aims to provide a tool that lets your designers design the way they always had using Illustrator and produce an output that is for the Web. It segways well into the other point that makes something like the ISIS piece so great. Inside the "ai2html" script (which reads like JavaScript?) is a part where some "NYT break points" turn up, circa line 668 of the script's version 0.54: It turns out that when you create multiple artboards in your Illustrator file, they will be generated with different HTML classes for the size they are optimized for. We leveraged that for our own graphics, like the third runway piece. You can even force the artboard to work for multiple break points, by adding the size it's meant for after the colon (see screenshot before). This is what it looks like when you squeeze it to a mobile screen size: The next "technology" in this piece: Swiper. Presenting a topic in the form of "slides" (on the piece's mobile version) is something that I find very interesting and would like to try out someday. We don't often get the chance to do it in our newsroom, where print is still king, but at least we know that it's possible to integrate elegantly. In this case, when you're on a mobile screen, first of all, you are given the narrow width artboard that was created on Illustrator via ai2htm. For instance, this is the PNG background of the first "slide": http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/05/15/isis-next/db6b19f7946afe46e0f01b83b7acb5575eab2aeb/isis-next-isis-control-map-hed.jpg Then, the Swiper script encloses your graphic div as a slide, so that touch, click and mousewheel events trigger going to the previous or next slide. That's incredibly simple, and yet I'm a bit impressed by it. The next thing that I like a lot from NYT maps (other media like WaPo do it too on breaking news) is the addition of relief. I know it's been done on print for many years, but I wish we had the ability to have it in our map library. As a smaller newsroom, lightly mechanized one, we often still trace our maps by hand. I'm going on a segway, but last week, I helped my colleague colour this map of congressional districts (for Chinese investments in the US). I learned on deadline that QGIS is a hassle to export from (and you can't export in vectorial formats that are stylized). The solution wasn't perfect and originally in the wrong projection. But print media approximations made things look smooth in the end (but I don't really like the feeling). So, again, when you have the tech ready to be used, your team can focus on doing journalism.

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For the first time at SCMP, we published an original back page with an interactive graphic (online) adaptation on the same day. The topic was China's overseas investments, visualising the magnitude of all deals, mergers and acquisitions, made by Chinese companies, many of which are state-owned entities. So, my colleague Alberto finished the paper back page graphic (full page broadsheet infographic) sometime last week, ready for publication this week. On Sunday night, I did a simple layout of the semi-circles, a brilliant idea, using D3. Over the course of Monday, I worked on layout and the legend. Then finally on Tuesday, as the print version came out, I went over the graphic with Alberto to get his comments and make sure he was entirely good with the end product. We spent this memorable 15-minute back and forth this afternoon, deciding what we'd do with those annotations (on the Rio Tinto and Nexen deals), finally settling on making the notes slimmer (because by mistake, I forgot to wrap the div's width attribute value in a function, it took a minimal width) and give them a border and white background, tooltip-style. The rest of the text was handled using ArchieML, although there was hardly any editing to do, and I was the only user. The graphic is responsive (it re-draws when hitting new break points), but doesn't retain all of its functionnalities on small screens. I'm pretty happy about the two-day turnover, but it could've been done quicker, if it weren't of endless fiddling with the legend and notes.

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NICAR, ai2html, space journalism

The big highlight of the last month was certainly going to NICAR, which was held in Atlanta on March 5-8. Between the runs to the liquor store and BBQ joints, I met a lot of fellow Canadians, and some of the journo-programmers whose work I've been admiring from afar. Here is a list of what I remember the most: - ai2html: The excellent Illustrator script was released to the public on the first day of NICAR. It has been one of the key tools made by the NYT graphics team that allows to convert Illustrator files into straight up HTML. An Illustrator artwork is decomposed into absolutely positioned text and a background for the remainder of the graphic. Tried it out immediately after returning to Hong Kong and it works pretty well. Now, inserting that into your website, whether it's responsive or not, that's something we've yet to figure out. - Space journalism: This past year has seen a bunch of really cool project making good use of satellite imagery for storytelling, such as ProPublica's Losing Ground and NYT's A Rogue State Along Two Rivers. For some reason, I never thought it could be (partially) made with publicly available information that you could put together with widely used tools (GDAL or Photoshop). There was a session on the first day and again another session on the topic during the lightning talks. - Everyone's just trying: The great thing with these conferences is that you get to measure your level of skill, etc., with others in your industry. And in fact, success is multi-factored and it's worth just trying things out. Maybe something will stick? It convinced me to write down what my wish list would be if I were to hire for my position.

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It's a step in the right direction. That's my assessment of the raw data released by the Hong Kong Financial Secretary's Office, along with the Financial Services and The Treasury Bureau at the same time as the budget speech on February 25, 2015. The data is on a page that's parallel to the one where the PDFs have been traditionally released for the last 15 years. I for one welcome the initiative. It has had a practical impact on the work we've been doing at the Post. Instead of having to update our dataset with scripts, I copied it from the CSV files. We met representatives of the government a couple of weeks before the release of the budget. The press secretary happened to be a computer science major, which certainly gave him a sensibility to the technical aspects that programmers seek when looking for open data (the Financial Secretary himself is a MIT grad -- at the school of architecture and planning). This release follows months of emailing (with a long gap in the spring and summer) with our friends of Open Data Hong Kong and the FSO. It shows it can be possible to encourage change in the government practices. As for more extensive use of the data, I doubt we will have a good case until data gets released for past years, and actual details of some numbers that only the individual departments have also be known to the public. In the meanwhile, the PDFs already prove to be an infinite source of news, if you know how to navigate them. My colleague Alan Yu had a marvelous find just by checking out expenditures of the police force (they bought three super-expensive crowd-control vehicles).

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Yes, you can scrape the new Elections Canada contributions database

Edit (2015-02-22): I've added the scripts on GitHub that are working for party contributors, and partially working for riding associations contributors. I'm starting the scrape for contribution reports (postal code, etc.), but it's extremely slow (6 pages per minute). It's probably because the machine I'm using is in Asia. If you have a bunch of machines on a good connection, let me know! Since 2009, I've been on the case of the Elections Canada contributions database, where all donations to political parties are "accessible" to the public. In the summer of 2013, the site was revamped and made considerably harder to scrape. You could always get the basic infos, like the name of the contributor, how much they gave, and even a unique identifier "client id" for each person. But for the rest, the postal code, municipality and province, that really allows you to do more serious crossing with other databases (or for maps), you couldn't retrive it in a simple way like before, when that personal information was found on popup pages, and a relatively simple URL without particular session check. So actually, I had given up at that point. But with a federal election coming up, and e-mails flying here and there about the election, I decided to put some time to poke around the site. When you scrape a site, the rule is always to understand how a human navigating the site goes around to get his information, what he triggers in terms of cookies, IDs, etc. My tools of predilection is just Chrome Developer Tools. Then, I use the handy "Copy as cURL", by right-clicking requests in the "Network" section, while navigating the site. In this case, I went to the donations to the parties, the largest of all the ways money enters the coffers of political parties (money may be sent through riding associations and candidates, among other ways). I noticed that the URL at the top changes, but if you just paste it in an incognito window (good way to test whether a page is also dependent of state), you are sent back to the homepage. E.g.: http://www.elections.ca/WPAPPS/WPF/EN/PP/ContributionReport?act=C2&returntype=1&option=4&queryid=b2d4d650d0304b2ebf46a3dff36d70a6&period=0&fromperiod=0&toperiod=0&exactMatch=False&contribrange=-1&contribclass=1%2C%206%2C%2012&selectallcontribclasses=True&addrclientid=24447&addrname=Jean%2BA.%2BCorsi&displayaddress=True&reportPage=1&totalReportPages=6127&ln_no=5318339&setfocusid=addresslink53183391 sends you back to this page http://www.elections.ca/WPAPPS/WPF/EN/PP/ So, quickly I identified the cookie as being crucial to getting the right pages. After poking around a little, I found out that what was even more important was the queryid. The queryid is generated when you select the parties you are searching. Of course, I will want to select all parties at once. When you click the button, it is as if you registered with the webapp as to which entities (an entity represent one annual/quarterly report sent by parties or candidates to Elections Canada), and the webapp returns you a valid queryid that you can now use for your scrape. I usually take the cURL command from the Chrome Dev Tools, but try to reduce it as much as possible, taking parts out and keeping the minimal version that would still yield valid data to be returned. In the case of parties, to get a valid queryid, I found that you don't actually need a previous queryid (even if on the Web, you will have one), and can blank out most of the parameters of the post data, but you will require the cookie, and probably the basic search parameters in the query string (as well as returntype in the post data, as whether the contributions are verified or not, I think). When you issue the cURL, the page will redirect you to a page with the next search page in the form of: http://www.elections.ca/WPAPPS/WPF/EN/PP/SelectSearchOptions?act=C2&period=0&returntype=1&fromperiod=2007&toperiod=2014&queryid=884ebe6c192d489bb17f842c080f86f8 (This won't work in your browser, because you may not have a valid cookie or the queryid will be invalidated by the time you read this.) After that, you can go to the report page and try to download all the listing pages: http://www.elections.ca/WPAPPS/WPF/EN/PP/ContributionReport?act=C2&returntype=1&option=4&queryid=7f48da109479493aac937abbbded46f8&period=0&fromperiod=0&toperiod=0&exactMatch=False&contribrange=-1&contribclass=1%2C%206%2C%2012&selectallcontribclasses=True&addrclientid=25922&addrname=Jocelyn%2BT%2BAantjes&displayaddress=True&reportPage=1&totalReportPages=1207&ln_no=5816619&setfocusid=addresslink581661930 As of today, there are 6127 pages of 200 entries each for contributions to parties, to all parties, between 2007 and 2013 inclusively (details of 2014 aren't in yet). What we'll be interested to see are the quarterly reports for 2015 later in the year, as that is the most lucrative time for parties. The same strategy should be mirrored for other entry points for the money. With the data, I would check for irregularities, like signs of weird amounts, or simply try to draw insights on the patterns of money collection. It's also a massive, very massive database, with in excess of a million entries, surely hundreds of thousands of unique contributors. Finding something in there is daunting. But if a simple data source can be provided, then you're half-way there already.

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China maps GIFs from our two most recent data stories at SCMP on air pollution in 2014 and ghost towns.

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Tigers and Flies: data and stories from data

Tigers and Flies is one of those ambitious data projects from a sorta exclusive source. You might think of "China corruption" as an abstract concept. Are accusations of corruption (whatever the motive) somehow documented? Turns out that they are. The scraping of the CCDI website (Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the agency in charge of conducting anti-corruption investigations) is very straightforward, had no special rate-limiting. [Added 2014-11-06: To perform the scrape, we used a combination of curl wrapped with a bash script to get the files. Then, a Python script to extract the extractable parts of any given press release. Finally, one of my utilities scripts was used to upload the new entries to Fusion Tables.]

What could not be automated is the data curating. It was about verifying the integrity of the scrape and extracting useful information such as names of people, places from those press releases. Certain elements could be parsed easily, like dates of publication, source of information, as they appeared at regular places in every press release. With more advanced parsing, you could probably automate more. The curating was tremendous, hard work from the part of my colleagues, spanning a couple of days (something that I didn't take part in). There was extra information that we didn't even get to use, like the party and government position, but the curated data is available if you want to make use of it. We then proceeded to visualise it, tell stories with the data. It seemed interesting to show the acceleration of President Xi Jinping's crackdown on corruption in 2014. The sections on every province and the PLA were helpful to understand the dynamics in a more granular way, to help differentiating the "tigers and flies", a colourful figure of speech used by Xi to describe the CCDI's role, and putting a "human face" on this crackdown.

Finally, something that might be a bit overlooked, is the count of people mentioned in the press releases per province. There were close to 700 names (twice, an unspecified number of people was given), but that's a small drop in all of the "flies", as 25,000 were said to have been investigated in the first half of 2014 only.

If at least indicative of the big picture and paired with data that we found on GDP, we found some surprising facts from the press releases. Unsurprisingly, the top "corrupt" province is Guangdong, China's richest. Closely follows is Beijing, the province-level municipality and capital of China. But then in third place, you find Hubei? And then, why are Zhejiang and Shanghai, two rich jurisdictions, all the way to the bottom in named officials? [Added 2014-11-06: And yes, one of the inspirations for the portraits in circles was a 2013 graphic by The NYTimes on Oscars contenders. How they handled the mugs was rather sophisticated, let alone the points layout editor that Bostock described in his 2013 Eyeo talk. Nowhere near this level of sophistication.

But I can tell you at least that we used Google Sheets as our CMS to arrange our circles in a rudimentary 2-D grid and to let our writers edit text directly in the people connections graphics.]

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Occupy Lapse: the story of excellent timing for timelapsing

Occupy Lapse, a project where we created automatically generated time-lapses using traffic webcam images from the Hong Kong Transport Department, came to be by pure luck. As Occupy Central, otherwise known as Umbrella Movement or Umbrella Revolution exploded on September 28, I was just about landing in Japan on a trip with my parents who were in Asia for a visit. A few weeks before, with weather observation in mind (what might it look like through one of the 180 traffic webcams when a big typhoon hits Hong Kong?), we set up an archive of snapshots, which the government provided as open data on its Data One portal. Only the latest image is available, thus the insight for archiving. The archive was humongous. It was a 320x240 JPEG image, at about one per minute (even as the govt claimed one per two minutes on their site), for each of the 180 webcams. 60 x 24 x 18 = 259,200 images. Each day of archiving was big of 2-3 GB. The data is awesome to have, but it's costly to store. Back to Japan, I started following the news on Twitter on my iPad, and started to see the scale of the protest. I was passed through Tamar on Friday night (during a jog) and it seemed small and under control. The Saturday evening was much bigger and louder when I hung around at the corner of Legislative Council and Lung Wo Rds. But nothing would have prepared us with the spontaneous movement that came afterwards. Then, I remembered the archive. What if you use ffmpeg to stitch the photos together into a video? I mastered vssh, the client terminal that I used on my iPad, but wish I had a program that allowed to paste from clipboard. In a night, I wrote a few ad hoc lines that did a "find" in the images directory for the latest x hours, for a given webcam, but couldn't open the mp4 video file generated from stitching together the images with ffmpeg/avconv (damn the iPad for being so work-unfriendly). On the second night, I managed to insert our SCMP logo in the top right of every video, and decided to send videos to my colleagues in Hong Kong who might be able to see something on their computers. Well, they did see something. James had the brilliant idea to put it up on Giphy, which is one of the sites that Facebook can display animated GIFs directly from (so it's like JPEGs -> MP4 -> animated GIF). A few days, when I came back to town, I helped build a map and an interface to put the time-lapses. It was the first time we used shell scripts in the back to keep a visualisation project up to date, by generating new videos for the seven webcams every hour, and giving access to past videos (the 4am and 4pm ones have links to them, but other ones are also available if you fiddle with the URL). Not super robust, but it works so far. Time-lapses are entertaining, but they also serve a pratical / newsy purpose. For instance, to objectively answer the question whether the crowds are thinning from one week to the other:

One of the regrets is that there weren't any other interesting close-up webcam on a crowd aside from the Hennessy & Yee Wo one. The one at Garden Rd & Queensway had some cool shots on September 28 as police was gathering, having a pep talk, sleeping on site, on the footbridge.

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Hong Kong's Intangible Cultural Heritage List and the challenges of practical uses of non-open "public" data

As part of a multimedia collection launched today, we had to create a new way of displaying the hefty list of 482 (the govt claims it's 480) items for Hong Kong's Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The government, in creating the list through its committee, has only made available a PDF file. We had to use OpenRefine to clean it up, which wasn't trivial. Then, there was a lot of anguish in getting to the count of 480 that they got (in graph theory parlance, it was about counting the leaves). Finally, the easiest part, was perhaps to decide how to render the data as a 4-level HTML nested list ((ul + li) * 4). The result was, in my opinion, quite elegant:

Although really, it's just an HTML list. Nothing fancy, because cross-platform was a requirement. When we published the piece today, this Friday morning, my friends Darcy and Mart jumped on the fact that someone at SCMP had published a CSV file for the masses! Can you imagine, a CSV! (Strangely, the Heritage Museum, which hosts the pages and files, changed all of its URLs today, without any 30[1-3] redirect. Probably enough to make Darcy, an information architect, cringe his teeth out.) Mart pointed out immediately in this thread on the ODHK group on Facebook that this can be a case study for public open data, where "data is simple enough for all government officials to understand it", but where the public servants in charge were deposed by the tyranny of data entry using Microsoft Word. We shall see what comes out of that exercise!

As a person obsessed with (scraping) data in his day to day job, that sort of job keeps one in good shape (and employed). But I hope that one day, we are given data that makes sense and is simple to reuse, that does not literally require hours just to clean up and re-model. That said, this particular topic of Intangible Culture is controversial in itself. My colleague Vivienne wrote earlier this month: But there is a dilemma. To sustain cultural heritage that's at risk of disappearing, cash and resources are needed. Promotions help bring visitors and money. But overexposure can commercialise a tradition, turning it into tourism spectacle and severing its ties to the local community. If we wanted to look closely at the sort of choices that were made to get to a 480-482-item list, we need to go deeper. Look at these excerpts of a long list of items (around 100) that were considered, then rejected from the list:

(That's from a Legco Hansard document from July 2, 2014 from page 156 / 16346 -- see database on the particular policy issue of ICH) I was sure bean curd sheet (腐竹), not just regular bean curd itself could've made the list if the cultural bearers returned the phone calls! It would be nice to have those tables in that PDF in a good machine-readable format, but it's probably not possible right now (I didn't verify beyond Google), even though Legco is known in the community as leaders in open government data. Well, to be continued...

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Tennis interactive graphics updated! Big Four & Road to Victory

So, our tennis graphics have just been updated or remixed: Road to Victory (2014 US Open Edition) (Tumblr)

This interactive graphic stems from work done in January around the Australian Open. My then-colleague Jane Pong collected the data and did the graphic for print (and basically designed it). I took it and made it into an interactive. The steps help to isolate the different rounds and the colors help quickly spot the sets lost (or lack thereof) along the way. It was such a clever design that I re-rendered it for the US Open, where the storyline calls for a visualisation of the minutes of play. I made some improvements, such as the hoverable minutes per set and a total at the end. I picked new colours to make it more US Open-ish. Behind the scenes, maybe 50% of the JavaScript code is different, mainly because the data source is different. The scores that Jane manually transcribed are now mechanically scraped from the US Open site using custom shell commands (just curl, cut, sed and some manipulations in vim) on individual match pages (see this Google sheet). Since all the Grand Slam sites use the same template and made by the same vendor, IBM, that'll save time for future tennis-related data visualisations. I also found out later that IBM exposes a large JSON file with all of the event's data. You can parse that into something tabular using OpenRefine if you need to restrict the data. How big are the Big Four? ("End of an era" Edition)

The Big Four graphic was published during Wimbledon in early July and the design is thoroughly explained on this Tumblr. It could need a "novice layer", but I think it at least succeeds in telling the big picture of the Big Four's dominance of tennis, over the last 11 years. The 2014 US Open marks a turning point in the apparent end of this dominance, with the losses of both Federer and Djokovic in the semifinals. For the first time since 2005, neither of them or Nadal are in a Grand Slam men's singles final.

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In the eye of the storm: typhoons in Hong Kong

Archives! Diagrams! Interactive graphics! Videos! Our team at SCMP published a new multimedia extravaganza today.

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Hundreds of thousands of forgotten Chinese workers helped the Entente Powers win WWI.

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China's first world war on SCMP.com + some of the technology behind it

It's work that we are very proud of publishing on SCMP.com this weekend. Over the course of the last few weeks (on and off), we've been working on the story of China's involvement in the first world war. My colleague Patrick Boehler wrote the story, gathered the extraordinary documents (photos, maps, illustrations -- even the poster of a movie made by Paramount Pictures), and produced the piece. It came out late Friday night and in the newspaper over the weekend. A back page infographic made by Alberto Lucas López also appeared both in Saturday's paper and online. Now, more about the techniques - First, there was skrollr, a pretty neat JavaScript library that helps create parallax effects that we like so much. We used that to a certain extent (for fading, mostly) in the Tiananmen piece. Skrollr.js has also been used by The Guardian (in 2012!), and also Sports Illustrated in their longforms such as this one on ice hockey. It was also used, beautifully so, by The New York Times in an illustrated feature on MMA fighter Charlie Rowan. - Then, to hold things together, we used Bootstrap.js, which is a framework for making responsive sites (leveraging the CSS "@media" query). It's the first time that I customize it using a CSS generator like Grunt. I winged it on the previous project. - The timeline at section 4 was obviously custom-made in D3.js. I wanted to make the maps in D3.js as well, but it would've been too time-consuming (so our fantastic art dept did them in AI). That's what brought me to wonder about tools to convert AI files straight to HTML. - Finally, as an attempt to improve performance on slow networks (although that shouldn't be a problem for most HK users), I called upon the Google tool/service Page Speed. That basically taught me a few things on pictures, number of colors in an image and colorspace. It's especially relevant to our project, since we have black and white pictures that we showed full screen. (If I didn't tell you, you probably would've guessed from the source code.)

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Taking stuff apart: Full-screening an iframe from inside (as seen on The Guardian's WWI multimedia feature)

Problem: you made a multimedia interactive and would like to embed that inside a regular page of your CMS (for whatever reason, like "SEO"). Solution: Provided by The Guardian (that subcontracted Kiln) in their new WWI multimedia feature.

The iframe containing the interactive is created at run-time from inside the "figure" element. A boot.js script is called, which sets things up. Aside from code that creates the iframe according to your type of device, boot.js includes an "expand" function to be called later when you first click on the moving image. boot.js sets up an eventListener of type message that gets called from inside the newly created iframe. So now, as a user, when you click on one of the triggers (the big yellow or pink discs), you are calling a function named "enterInteractive", which is found in app.js, which is minified, but shown here:

window.parent.postMessage is used to send a message back to the container of the iframe, where our event listener is listening. The message is "expand" and the expand() function in boot.js is called. This is what expand() looks like:

That triggers a bunch of stuff: saving of the elements such as the iframe with the multimedia, nuke() to delete all the non-necessary elements, maximise() to expand the iframe to fill the screen. There you go! Nice trick to keep a single URL for sharing around and that is within your CMS' infrastructure and template. But sounds like many hoops to go through for just that.

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More adventures in legacy medium land: Sunday New York Times, July 13, 2014

Suzanne came back from the US and got me a copy of the Sunday New York Times of the week before. *More glorious pics of here!!* Otherwise known as the legacy medium of the NYT, it elicits a certain aura of mystery for someone who's never lived in the U.S. I'm not sure if I like paper. I just subscribed to the iNYT, because you get the online all-access with it and altogether it's cheaper than an all-access by itself (at 185 HKD/mo, it's about the same thing as the 20 USD/mo for the iPad subscription). The last newspaper I subscribed to was the Globe and Mail, and I think I stopped around 2002. For sure, the main interest (at least to me) of paper is the surface you're given for cool data visualisations. It's simply something that electronic devices still can't beat (until the portable projector becomes mainstream *g*).