News Production In The Society In Transition

The thesis adopted a media sociology approach to describe and analyze news production process and its features of The Southern Weekend from 1983 to 2001.Demarcated by 1996 when The Southern Weekend redesigned its layout, the newspaper initiated a profound change in the format of its major news product from culture and entertainment stories to in-depth stories and opinions relevant to public affairs. Accordingly, with a sense of social responsibility and professionalism, its journalists dig up and present the facts and truth to the public; meanwhile, they provide a full access for the public to express their opinions and ideas concerning broad social issues, which characterizes The Southern Weekend's media performance as a participatory journalism serving the public interest.The Southern Weekend has undergone the whole process of both social transition and media reform in China. To a great extent, not only is it a witness and note-keeper of social transition, but also it is an important participant and product of media reform in China. The development of The Southern Weekend is naturally located in historical settings where profound changes are taking place in all social systems, and in that sense, the research into the news production of The Southern Weekend could also make it possible to link the media system and political-economic systems and analyze the interplay between them.The thesis is composed of four chapters:The first chapter examines the editorial policy, news format, news production process and the institutional structure of The Southern Weekend from 1983 to 1995.To a great extent, news production at this period is an experiment. Embedded in the media reform starting from 1979, it is characterized by improvisations of practitioners to explore the potential of The Southern Weekend as a new newspaper genre. Culture and entertainment stories catered to the audience, and in that sense, the realization of the newspaper and news as a commodity could mean a farewell to Leninism Journalism. Based on that, the practitioners gradually developed The Southern Weekend's editorial policy that was imposed upper down as "the supplement " to The Southern Daily, which is an official provincial mouthpiece. "Enlightenment" and "to be a bridge to link the intellectuals and the public " became two key points in their new design for The Southern Weekend, and "There could be some truth that we don't tell, but we should never tell a lie" has also become a principle for their journalistic practice that they hold on to ever since.The second chapter starts from a quantitative analysis to prove the dominance of investigative reporting in the The Southern Weekend's news production. Based on that, through text analysis and in-depth interviews with practitioners, the researcher describes the process and the features of doing investigative stories in The Southern Weekend. The researcher further explores the newsroom culture in order to find out if it is relevant to the preference for investigative reporting. The researcher concludes that during this period, newsroom culture is featured by a widely shared journalistic idealism, a personified style of management, and an animated discussion of professional issues. As a news genre, investigative reporting matches the sense of social responsibility and professionalism these journalists share, and serves their objective to advocate social reform in China. By examining how The Southern Weekend exercises its watchdog role in areas other than Guangdong Province, and also by studying some cases in which The Southern Weekend follow up or interplay with other media in muckraking, the researcher concludes that The Southern Weekend's investigative journalism has become an important supplement to "investigative journalism as a governance technology" approach. In the end, the researcher studies three cases in which The Southern Weekend interacts with policy and law that regulates media performance, and the researcher tends to think that the interaction has a profound influence on news production process and has made it more complicated.The third chapter focuses on three sections of The Southern Weekend, which are The Public Teahouse, The Public Notebook and The Consumers' Square. It aims to explore the role of editor in news production. Do they have a specific frame of rules for news selection and determining news valence? Does that frame influence their editing and presenting the news product, and how? And is their role-play as gatekeepers relevant to overall characteristics of the symbolic social reality and interpretations The Southern Weekend presented? Through in-depth interviews with editors and an text analysis, the researcher concludes that these editors share some fundamental rules in their routine frame for news selection and determining news valence, which is to lift the economic and cultural barriers and open the access to The Southern Weekend for the public, most of which are economically and culturally marginalized groups. These groups are encouraged to take The Southern Weekend as a notebook to describe their daily lives, as a teahouse to express their ideas and...