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Abstract
This paper content analyzed 1584 news samples from 10 newspapers in China in 2012 and 2018 with the aim of exploring how the style of news has changed concurrent with the rapid expansion of digital media. The results showed that newspaper journalism in China is currently undergoing de-professionalization. Among six conventional indicators of professional news, three (brevity, immediacy, plurality of sources) are in significant decline, and the other three (adherence to conventional news structure, objectivity, and public orientation) are in partial decline. Such a shift can be interpreted as a decline in news quality, or alternatively, the formation of new journalism.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The distinction between party-oriented and market-oriented media dates back to at least 1992 (Zhao, Citation1998, p. 50). Although all newspapers in the PRC are politically controlled by the Communist Party of China (CPC), there is in practice a distinction. Party-oriented papers have as their prime task the implementation of CPC propaganda policies. Market-oriented papers are also obliged to follow CPC directives but devote more attention to non-political journalism. These papers normally belong to the same press group and answer to the same political masters. For instance, Southern Daily and Southern Metropolitan Daily are the party-oriented and market-oriented newspapers, respectively, of the Southern Media Group.
2 We use the term source plurality rather than source diversity since research has shown that government sources are very strongly represented in this respect (H. Wang et al., 2017). When many sources are quoted, they are often all government sources. Plurality is thus a more appropriate category than diversity.
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Haiyan Wang
Haiyan Wang is an associate professor for the Department of Communication at the University of Macau. Her academic and research interests include the impact of digital media on journalism and political communication. She is the author of The Transformation of Investigative Journalism in China: From Journalists to Activists (2016, Lexington Books).
Jing Meng
Jing Meng is an assistant professor in media studies with Peking University HSBC Business School. Her research interests reside in digital journalism and digital technologies. She has published with journals including Chinese Journal of Communication, Asian Journal of Communication, Media, Culture and Society.