Live Wire Blog

First impressions of Chinese media

Posted on July 8, 2008 by Karen Pojmann
Category: Mizzou in China

GUEST BLOG

During their first week in Beijing, Mizzou journalism students have visited People’s Daily and Beijing Youth Daily in China — and have become media attractions themselves. Some observations about Chinese media:

Let’s put it right out there. The media in China are HUGE! … There are nearly 9,400 different print magazines in China (including many of our well-known titles from America redone Asian-style), not to mention the 4,000 online-only publications. And USA Today, America’s largest daily at 2.2 million circulation, doesn’t even come close to China’s People’s Daily at 3 million prints every day. Can anyone say deforestation? Someone get a tree-hugger over here pronto! China and America rival each other in the number of Internet users, at more than 210 million each. Talk about your World-Wide Web. The major difference is that the U.S. has pretty much reached its plateau at just over 70 percent usage in the country. China is still growing by 72 million users a year. To put that is perspective, that’s an average of 200,000 new Internet users (or the city of St. Louis) every day.

For online editions, I guess they’re not that different. The People’s Daily and USA Today Online both have about 2 million unique visitors daily to their homepages. But the People’s Daily also comes in 10 different languages. Yep, 10. I feel so unilingual. Just the community section of People’s Daily is larger than the whole Missourian building, and there are 80 other sections to put online. Can you imagine the type of editing that must go on in these publications? One thing the U.S. tops China on is advertising revenue (beating them at about $1 billion). But the majority of Chinese papers have a lower ad ratio, giving more editorial content to the reader. Not a fair fight.

Oh, I almost forgot. How do you get the news to reach so many people spread out so wide? It’s not by TV like the U.S., although they do have a massive CCTV network. Nope, it’s by cell phone. Some U.S. papers are starting to go this route with flash updates. But with a monthly mobile increase of 7.2 billion, Chinese media have seen the light. And they like it, with the revenue from mobile news reaching 805 billion RMB in 2007. I’m just awestruck at the size of things over here.
- Laura Dotson

The one thing that is amazing to me is the media presence throughout the whole thing. We seem to be a big deal here. There were TV cameras and journalists waiting for us when we got off the plane and arrived at the hotel, and unless we have been in our rooms, a video camera or photographer has been within six feet of me snapping away. I’ve been interviewed about six times in the past 24 hours, and one question they always ask is: “What do you think about the air quality?” When I said that I thought it was bad to the first reporter, he asked why and I replied that I hadn’t been able to see the tops of buildings yesterday when we were walking outside. He then proceeded to ARGUE with me, saying I was wrong and that yesterday had been rainy so it didn’t count. Journalistic ethics seem to be a little different here. We watched as a photographer took the contract out of a volunteer’s hand, put it in another person’s hand took a picture and then rearranged the scene again. … My fellow Canadian Mark Welsh and I … both got asked to do an interview on CCTV (China’s ABC) with their equivalent of Larry King/Oprah (or so we’ve gotten ourselves to believe). The Chinese Oprah = Choprah. It is happening on the 14th, so I will find it on YouTube! - Allison Bennett