A Step Forward?

Abstract

Drawing on Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory and Moore’s concept of chasm, this paper investigates how data journalism is locally adopted and historically embedded in China, as well as what facilitates or impedes its diffusion into the country’s media practices. A combined study of content analysis (n = 290) and semi-structured interviews with 20 Chinese media practitioners shows that despite enthusiasm for implementing this innovative form of journalism, it is only practiced at a cursory level with differences observed among traditional media, internet portals, and new media. While practitioners see clear advantages in data-driven sense-making and storytelling, there remains skepticism among those who doubt its compatibility with China’s existing media system and have complexity concerns, or else are perplexed about its trialability in the context of a compressed innovation cycle. China’s insufficient inheritance of quantitative reporting tradition and its long-held synthetic cognitive mode, together with the predicament of data availability and buffering tactics deployed by Chinese media to tackle uncertainties, all call into question how far data-driven journalistic innovation can extend its reach in the Chinese context.

KEYWORDS:

• Chasm
• China
• content analysis
• diffusion
• data journalism
• innovation adoption
• semi-structured interview

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their most helpful suggestions.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Links: http://datanews.caixin.com/2013-11-25/100609098.html; http://datanews.caixin.com/2014/zhoushicailu/.

2. In China, only the websites of central- and provincial-level news media and government/Party agencies, along with a few large commercial websites, have an authorized license to produce and publish news on websites. In particular, large internet portals can only reproduce political news released by the official news media, but they are allowed to gather and publish sports, technology and entertainment news on their own account.

3. Retrieved from http://www.echinagov.com/uploads/1/file/public/201805/20180529090122_92moce8w97.pdf.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Project No. 16YJC860029) and from a grant from Beijing Federation of Social Science Circles (Project No. 2018QNRC07).