Metro Newspaper Journalists In China

This book explores how journalists at local metro papers in a south-western China metropolis give meaning to their work and how these meanings are shaped by the specific social environment within which these journalists operate. These metro papers provide the bulk of daily news to the general public in China, yet are often understudied compared to the country’s party news outlets. Informed by fieldwork in four metro newspapers, the book puts forward a grounded theory for exploring journalists’ occupational culture: the aspiration-frustration-reconciliation framework.

This book explores how journalists at local metro papers in a south-western China metropolis give meaning to their work and how these meanings are shaped by the specific social environment within which these journalists operate. These metro papers provide the bulk of daily news to the general public in China, yet are often understudied compared to the country's party news outlets. Informed by fieldwork in four metro newspapers, the book puts forward a grounded theory for exploring journalists' occupational culture: the aspiration-frustration-reconciliation framework.

This book explores how journalists at local metro papers in a south-western China metropolis give meaning to their work and how these meanings are shaped by the specific social environment within which these journalists operate. These metro papers provide the bulk of daily news to the general public in China, yet are often understudied compared to the country’s party news outlets. Informed by fieldwork in four metro newspapers, the book puts forward a grounded theory for exploring journalists’ occupational culture: the aspiration-frustration-reconciliation framework.

This book, the first of its kind, investigates the historical trajectory and current situation of popular journalism in the People's Republic of China. Taking a popular cultural perspective, the book redefines “popular journalism” as a particular journalistic genre and media form and applies it to conceptualize popular journalism in the Chinese context. In particular, it examines how the dynamic and complex interplay of politics, the market, culture, and communication technology in shifting contexts has shaped the changing landscape of popular journalism in contemporary China. Meanwhile, regardless of how these factors might have changed over time, the fundamental nature of popular journalism as a source of fun and a troublemaker against elite powers in China, as in other places, has remained. The book further argues that the historical development of popular journalism in China forms an important and integral part of the country's social-cultural fabric and ultimately illustrates the mediated ideological and cultural struggle between popular/public and elite/state discourses in the country’s everyday social life in its challenging and discursive transition to modernity.

This edited collection brings together journalism scholars from mainland China, Hong Kong, the UK and Australia to address a variety of pressing issues and challenges facing digital journalism in China today. While China shares certain affinities with the digital disruption of media in other settings, its experience and articulation of change is ultimately unique. This volume explores the implications of digital media technologies for journalists’ professional practice, news users’ consumption and engagement with news, as well as the shifting institutional, organizational and financial structures of news media. Drawing on case studies and quantitative and qualitative approaches, contributors address questions concerning: whether China is witnessing ‘disruptive’ or ‘sustainable’ journalism; if, and in what ways, digital technologies may disrupt journalism; and whether Chinese digital journalism converges with or diverges from Western experiences of digital journalism. Digital Journalism in China is an important addition to the literature on digital journalism, comparative media analysis, the Chinese Communist Party’s social media strategies, tabloidization trends, and the conflict between newsroom and classroom in journalism education, and will be of interest to advanced students, scholars, and practitioners alike.

Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, this volume shows the complexity behind the central role the party-state plays in shaping social media platforms. The party-state increasingly penetrates commercial social media while aspiring to turn its own media agencies into platforms. Yet state-sponsored platformization does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party’s desired outcomes. Citizens continue to appropriate social media for creative public engagement at the same time that more people are managing their online settings to reduce or refuse connection, inducing new forms of crafted resistance to hyper-social media connectivity. The wide-ranging essays presented here explore the mobile radio service Ximalaya.FM, Alibaba’s evolution into a multi-platform ecosystem, livestreaming platforms in the United States and China, the role of Twitter in Trump’s North Korea diplomacy, user-generated content in the news media, the emergence of new social agents mediating between state and society, social media art projects, Chinese and US scientists’ use of social media, and reluctance to engage with WeChat. Ultimately, readers will find that the ten chapters in this volume contribute significant new research and insights to the fast-growing scholarship on social media in China at a time when online communication is increasingly constrained by international struggles over political control and privacy issues.

By investigating the Southern Weekly Incident, in which censorship of the prominent Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly triggered mass online contention in Chinese society, Resistance in Digital China examines how Chinese people engage in resistance on digital networks whilst cautiously safeguarding their life under authoritarian rule. Chen's in-depth analysis of the Southern Weekly Incident ties together overlapping debates in internet studies, Chinese studies, social movement studies, political communication, and cultural studies to discuss issues of civic connectivity, emotions, embodiment, and the construction of a public sphere in digital China. Resistance in Digital China demonstrates a valuable methodology for conducting in-depth empirical examination of an act of resistance in order to explore political, cultural, and sociological meanings of Chinese people's resistance within party limits. Fruitfully combining 45 interviews with key players in the Southern Weekly Incident with largely Western-based communications theory, Chen develops an understanding of the ongoing formation of the Chinese public sphere as elite-led and emotional, at once invoked and rejected by Chinese citizens.

The study of Chinese media is a field that is growing and evolving at an exponential rate. Not only are the Chinese media a fascinating subject for analysis in their own right, but they also offer scholars and students a window to observe multi-directional flows of information, culture and communications within the contexts of globalization and regionalization. Moreover, the study of Chinese media provides an invaluable opportunity to test and refine the variety of communications theories that researchers have used to describe, analyse, compare and contrast systems of communications. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media is a prestigious reference work providing an overview of the study of Chinese media. Gary and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley bring together an interdisciplinary perspective with contributions by an international team of renowned scholars on subjects such as television, journalism and the internet and social media. Locating Chinese media within a regional setting by focusing on ‘Greater China’, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinese communities; the chapters highlight the convergence of media and platforms in the region; and emphasise the multi-directional and trans-national character of media/information flows in East Asia. Contributing to the growing de-westernization of media and communications studies; this handbook is an essential and comprehensive reference work for students of all levels and scholars in the fields of Chinese Studies and Media Studies.