A Selection Of Urban News Events In The Context Of Journalism And Commercialization

Chinese economic reforms have brought great changes in the relationships between the media and power. Above of all, the market power has overwhelmingly interfered in the media operational behaviors and exerted its force on the whole process of the news production. As the pioneer of media transition, the urban media have been impacted tremendously by the media commercialization. Here, the relationships among the market, the ideology and the intrinsic news value norms are getting more and more complex, thus the conflicts among them are getting more and more severe gradually.Changes in the Chinese media's operational behaviors during the current social transition have created nontrivial shift not only in media's internal and external structures, but more directly, their news selection process. The changing relationships between media and government, media and market, media and audience, media and other organizations, and between journalists and news sources are all found to have a prominent bearing on media content. In the thesis, the pressure from the ideology is above consideration. The attention is focused on the other two elements, i.e., market power and news value norms. The author studied the effect on the news coverage caused by market logic and journalistic logic and then proposed the functional modes in which the two factors act on the news event selection. As to evaluate the force and feasibility that the two different power acting upon city's news selection, many representative cases are investigated.Based on a content analysis of front page news stories in three different city's newspapers, the author of the thesis found that although commercialization is an incontestably fact, Chinese urban media still remain with limited market-driven journalism. Even though the mediaunder the market pressure have to reform their format and content to be more appealing or even sensational, they are still in keeping with the law of journalism. In other words, in the era of media commercialization, the journalistic logic is kind of not as evident as it was before, but it still plays an important role in the event selection process of the city's news. The theoretical discussion concludes that the journalistic logic and the market logic coexist in course of the city's news selection . To become Chinese mainstream media and gain further prosperity, the city's media must choose the "advanced way" by taking measures to step up the journalists' professionalism and bring up a high-stuff team.