Media

Reach spreads far and wide

By Zhao Huanxin and Kane Wu (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-01 10:13

Journalism educator Li Xiguang, who is in his early 50s, still regrets the fact that he was denied a chance to become a reporter nearly 30 years ago. The 1982 Nanjing University graduate's application to a national newspaper was turned down by the school authorities after they decided the student had been way too "liberal" and "slack in discipline". During his four years in the capital of Jiangsu province, Li spent more time listening to foreign radio programs than he did reading recommended books. He shared the headlines and highlights of the English news with his fellow students by posting transcripts on the wall.

Li would justifiably shoot down such allegations if they were made against him today, when students have more access to information than Li and his peers could have dreamed of.

He would also have little problem landing a job as a journalist because, a few years after his rejection, the secluded society, partly shaped by a monotonous media, began to undergo drastic changes and develop an increasingly dynamic media industry.

"The only foreign magazines that we could find were back editions of Newsweek and Time, which my teachers brought back from their overseas trips," says Li, who is now a professor of the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University.

Television programs were also monotonous. It was not until 1980, when Li was a sophomore, that he was able to watch foreign entertainment shows on China Central Television (CCTV).

Today, the country has 247 TV channels and foreign shows can be seen every day.

Moreover, 17,000 overseas newspapers and magazines are available to Chinese subscribers and can be picked up in hotels and airports and other places where foreigners may congregate, Liu Binjie, head of the General Administration of Press and Publication, told China Daily earlier.

And there are also Internet podcasts, wire reports and video streams.

By the end of December, the number of Chinese Internet users had reached 457 million, making China the largest online community in the world. The primary reason why a whopping 77 percent go online is to get news, the China Internet Network Information Center said in its annual report in January.

Seven years after graduation, Li realized his dream and became a journalist. He switched to a teaching job a dozen years later, believing that it was more important at that time to teach people to become more media-literate than to carry on in the profession. Besides, he says he could be a professor and a reporter, simultaneously, in the Internet era.

For veteran journalist Qian Gang, practicing journalism in China is a trailblazing process.

"Our generation didn't have any formal journalism education. We were self-taught journalists, learning from our counterparts from the US, from Germany, from any channel that was open to us, which resulted in many amazing effects on China's media landscape," Qian, 58, says as he looked back on his more-than-30-year media career.

Now a writer and co-director with the China Media Project of Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong, Qian started his first job at the PLA Daily as its Beijing correspondent in 1979, after 10 years of service in the army.

"One year after the reform and opening-up policy was established, the media industry was livelier than ever," Qian says. "We were introduced to American journalism textbooks and journals containing all the award-winning masterpieces by Western journalists. They were mind-blowing."

Qian was quickly promoted to be the head of the paper's reporting team in 1984. The 1980s, he says, was an era when the media industry was filled with young and enterprising minds, yearning restlessly for higher journalism standards.

He was particularly inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning US writer and journalist John Hersey, whose account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima, Japan, was acclaimed as one of the finest pieces of journalism of the 20th century.

"We looked up to Western journalists but didn't put them on a pedestal," Qian says. "I said to myself, if he can do that, why can't I?

Qian left PLA Daily to found China Disaster Reduction Press, a periodical that focused on natural disasters and accidents.

"We designed the size of the paper and the page layout following the style of USA Today, America's most popular newspaper at the time," he says. "It was my first experiment to specifically cater to the readers' needs and it worked well. The paper became a great seller."

Qian was also involved in the founding of Life Week, one of China's first news magazines to receive investment from outside the mainland. He was sent to Frankfurt, Germany, in 1993 to study German weeklies. He was later hired by CCTV to lead a brand new program, News Probe, in 1996, focusing on investigative reporting.

Qian's career peaked when he became the managing editor in 1998 of Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend, a well-known newspaper that has a record of exposing political, economic and social issues.

"You may find some of our reports sensational from back in the late 1990s. It was not purely for marketing purposes. Our reporters were young and emotional, especially when they reported on social injustices," he says.

In 2003, Qian went to Hong Kong to lecture and conduct research into China's media. As the director of China Media Project, he now has an even broader picture of Chinese media.

"Now that we have more professional methods to verify facts, journalists should carry on our tradition of independent spirit and better play our watchdog role."

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page20)