Marketing Credibility

Abstract

New communication technologies have had a major impact on the newspaper press in China. They have lost readers and advertisers and have experienced economic difficulties. These have been more severe for the commercially-oriented newspapers than the official party papers. In response to the loss of advertising they have adopted three strategies. The first is internal reorganization. Editorial and business departments have been merged into sections charged with producing both newspaper content and advertising revenue and which have been set explicit revenue targets. The second has been a heavy stress on non-news gathering activities. These include trading favourable coverage for advertising and using the newspaper to develop other non-news businesses. Thirdly, journalists have been encouraged to adapt to business roles and undertake directly commercial tasks. These have included the sale of advertising space and, more indirectly, the exploitation of their professional contacts as leads for their business colleagues. These strategies have eroded, and sometimes completely removed, the firewall between the journalistic and business goals of the newspapers. Journalists are increasingly subordinated to the needs of revenue raising rather than news reporting.

KEYWORDS:

• Newspapers
• China
• credibility
• advertising
• editorial
• business
• firewall
• new media

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

DECLARATION

Some of the material used in this article appeared in Chinese as Wang, H., Sparks, C., & Huang, Y. (2018) 作為市場工具的傳媒公信力：新媒體技術衝擊與經濟下滑雙重壓力下中國紙媒的社會正當性困境 (Media credibility as a marketing tool: How the mainland Chinese press copes with technological challenges and economic crisis.) ⟪傳播與社會學刊⟫, 總第43 期（2018)：123–154 (Communication & Society, 43, 123–154.)

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded from the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Project No.: 16YJA8 60009, Journalism Production in the Context of Media Convergence), the Dr Lee Shau Kee Donation to HKBU [grant number LSK14-15/P14 JOUR]. The Impact of Political, Technological and Economic Change on Chinese Newspaper Journalism) and the Hong Kong RGC’s GRF [grant number HKBU 12605317] (Changing media, Changing audience: How Chinese journalists perceive, address and interact with their audience in the online environment)