Framework Of News Quality: A Theoretical Construct, And Organizational Culture

This dissertation makes an original systematic research of elite news from the basic levels of principle and application. Born in 1990s, the "elite news" seems to make a contradiction between "news" and "elite", which are not closely associated. The attempt to solve the contradiction gives rise to a third discourse, which is the theoretical goal of this study. The applicative goal, however, is to meet the challenges of media vulgarization, which has long existed in American media and become a chronic illness as a concomitant of the media transformation since 1830s. Now that the social transformation is taking place in China, which also includes the media transformation a lesson should be learnt from others' fall. In response, news professionals have to be culturally "cognizant", making the development of elite culture in media organization a preferred strategy. Therefore, this paper has introduced the western theories of social construction and organizational culture. Via localization, the former becomes the foundation of this study and provides the elements for a theory of elite news. The latter both participates in building that theory and sets up the implementation framework for its application.The starting point of building the theory necessitates the conceptual back-tracing and current positioning in the spatio-temporal framework. Adopting the criterion of "the general situation of journalism" and taking the "good news article" as the proto-form of elite news, this study makes a diachronic research. The incipience of elite news is approximately between 1852, when Marx wrote for the New York Tribune, and 1917, when the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism is set up. During and after that period, the representative works by the outstanding journalists such as Shao Piaoping, William H. Russell (Brit.), John Reed (Amer.) are also among the list of elite news. Since 1979, the awards of "National Good News Story" and "Chinese Prize for Journalism" have built an appropriate domestic environment for the birth of "elite news". Since 1990s, the term of "elite news" has begun to be adopted. The "Five Ones Project" launched by the Central Publicity Ministry and the "Elite Products Year" organized by People's Daily have accentuated the value of elite news. In 1999, the paper by Professor Liu Haigui makes the formal mention of "elite news". Observed synchronically, elite news stand out by their explicitness, depth and humane concern. Overlapping with either the prized journalist works or the prototype set by the "Five Ones Project", the concept of "elite news" thrives in an environment of media culture and informational economy characterized by a mix of high and low qualities.This dissertation attempts to solve the contradiction by conceptual construction. Based on the previous works, refined definitions of the "news" and "elite products" in development are given before logical deductions are made to result in a new definition: the elite news is the type of journalist works with accurate content, succinct style, and spiritual intensity. Its qualification is established both by scholarly opinions and prize-awarding standards, tested by the dual criteria of "above-average quality" and "criterion reconstruction".It is a convention to construct the theory from concepts to principles, which are as follows: 1) subjectively, elite news result from reporters' sense of social responsibility and their "imagination of reputation"; objectively, they result from the acknowledgement of "paragons" by the community and media organizations as well as the academic construction of "ideal types"; 2) elite news are fundamentally motivated by the interaction between media culture and superior culture. As an important embodiment of social culture, media culture is composed of "neutral culture", "superior culture" and "inferior culture". Its function as a "stirrer" enables it to give incessant rise to various cultural products, among which are the elite news; 3) media organizational culture is an effective mechanism of the production of elite news. As I mentioned, "media is media", which reminds the producers of social culture of their reason or self-consciousness. On the other hand, "media is media organization", which means as reproducers of culture, media organizations should be responsible for the quality of social culture. Therefore, the production of elite news is bound to begin with the construction of media organizational culture.In simple words, media organizational culture can be regarded as the thinking and behaving methods of a media organization in its operation, including the totality of tradition, philosophy, professional criteria, etc. and characterized by the social, open, paradoxical and interactive features. The operation of elite media organizational culture is thus based on the identification of the product value, or the "ethic and aesthetic significance of the product when it is communicated". Therefore, the "low taste" work is fundamentally excluded from bearing any cultural values. It is on this basis that the values of elite news are redefined as "journalist professionalism", "superior culture orientation" or "learning and creation", which influence and coordinate the public behavior by the prescriptive power of institutional culture. Having made a detailed analysis of the relationship between institutional culture and institution, this paper turns to the tendency of the traditional media organizations to convert from the "bureaucratic structure" to the flat and humane structure of "new organization", so as to emphasize the importance of institutional culture for the current development of media organization. During the transitional period, the "elite team" can be used to embody institutional culture and play a role in the production of elite products. To that end, a manageable model of elite group is introduced.As the elite news are a systematic unity of content, form and ideology (spiritual intensity), the behavioral culture is aimed to integrate all these three resources. The "ideology" comes from the value redefinition of elite products, which is embodied by three tenets of elite reports: 1) highlighting the news value, or "maximizing the news value"; 2) leading social progress by enhancing the public taste; 3) stressing harmonious relation, which mainly applies to the inherent quality of news products. These tenets have to rely on the reporters' moral standards and thinking methods. The former is remindful of the so-called "moral articles" and "an article is as good as a man", while the latter refers to dialectic thinking and scientific thinking, i.e., thinking in the fashion of "contradictory unity" and complementing and amending the irrational factors in the facts in the scientific spirit. "Content" deals with the factual elements as well as their symbolized reconstructions, especially on the meanings, and...