'Press-Internet Interaction [BaowangHudong]': User-Generated Content, News Routine and Media Publicity---A Study of 'The Net Section' in China's Market-Driven Newspape

In recent years, market-driven newspapers in China have increasingly established the "Press-Internet Interaction Section [Baowang Hudong Lanmu]" to regularly incorporate user-generated content.This dissertation tries to describe, analyze, and explain this phenomenon. The study examines the news routine and news content of one exemplary section, "The Net Section" of S-News. The exploration focuses on the following questions: What is the news routine in this "Press-Internet Interaction Section"? Is it different from established newspaper routines? How is it formed? How does it work? Does the news routine promote the publicness of the news content? And why? So far most existing literature on this topic examines cases in societies with liberal traditions of news-making. This study provides a new point of reference in the contexts of societies outside the liberal traditions such as in China.;This study finds that S-News has established several new public-oriented routines to appropriate the user-generated content. Meanwhile, the newspaper also retains some established routines that threaten the publicness of media. These two types of news routines make the news content of "Press-Internet Interaction Section" only show limited publicness as other Chinese media.;The performance of "Press-Internet Interaction Section" is the result of a confluence of factors. The factors include the state, the market, the journalistic professionalism and the Internet. Except the Internet, all three other factors construct and destruct the publicness of media to varying degrees. As a result, the possibility provided by the Internet to increase the publicness of media has been minimal within established power structures.