Reporting
Long-form reporting, features, interviews, and narrative work rooted in close observation.
Independent media practice
Frictograph
An award-winning independent media practice by Jiannan Shi, based in the Netherlands.
[Friction is] the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.
Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
Frictograph makes long-form reporting, investigations, OSINT, and interactive stories about technology, society, and global China, moving between systems and lived experience.
What Frictograph does
I tell stories, big or small.
Long-form stories, investigations, and public-facing storytelling about systems, power, and ordinary life.
Investigations
OSINT, documents, databases, and system-level reporting on platforms, institutions, and power.
Storytelling
Interactive stories and research translation that make complex systems easier to grasp.
How I work
I care about human voices.
First of all, be human.
Crafts
I work across OSINT, interactive storytelling, database reporting, cross-cultural interviews, ethnographic writing, longform journalism, and cross-border collaboration, including work with vulnerable and marginalised groups.
Commitments
Influenced by John Dewey and Paulo Freire, I treat reporting as shared inquiry, not extraction. I work with people, scrutinise power, serve the public’s right to know, and minimise avoidable harm. I do not trade a source’s safety—or my own—for access, speed, or institutional pressure.
Commons
Knowledge has public value when others can examine, use, and extend it. Where consent, privacy, safety, and public interest allow, I share methods, evidence, data, and tools.
Why this name
Frictograph
Friction is physical: surfaces meet, resist, and produce heat, wear, sometimes light. Anna Tsing used the image for something larger: the collisions between the local and the global. Out of that pressure come not necessarily conflicts——the wisdom from the people creates workarounds, alliances, many more creative responses.
Frictograph takes its name from that idea. To graph is to trace and record. My work returns to these sites of friction, where systems press on ordinary life and people improvise inside unequal arrangements. Recording friction does not smooth it away; it makes complexity visible.
About
Jiannan Shi
Jiannan Shi is a journalist covering society, technology, and global China. Based in the Netherlands, he grew up in a small city along the lower Yellow River, studied across four countries, and follows how people move through systems, borders, and uneven change.
I have worked across rural and metropolitan China and keeps returning to the frictions between culture, geography, and ambition. My reporting received the SOPA Award for Excellence in Technology Reporting, one of the highest journalism awards across Asia.
My path was shaped by social equity initiatives. That remains the ethic of the work: knowledge, opportunity, and public voice should not belong only to the already powerful.
Beyond writing, I also work across documentary and photography. Thanks to my past roles in NGOs, I am an experienced facilitator and community organizer. Frictograph therefore treats storytelling as a means of public engagement. I move between reporting, images and research, and I welcome public collaboration.
Outside journalism, I have researched the social implications of machine learning and taught AI safety. Related publications are on my ORCiD profile.
Education
- MPhil in Sociology ｜ University of Cambridge
- BA (Hon), Social Science （Minors in Interactive Media and Journalism) | New York University Shanghai, Prague, and New York
Recognitions
- SOPA Award for Excellence in Technology Reporting
- Humanity in Action Senior Fellow
Contact
For reporting, commissions, collaborations, research, interactive projects, tips, and sensitive leads. Please also consider information safety: I recommend using a fresh address and considering the PGP route below.
PGP public key
PGP identity currently corresponds to frictograph@proton.me.