A Comparative Study Of The Differences Between The Chinese And American Internet Media In The Beijing Olympics Coverage

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games are unprecedentedly successful in terms of media coverage since it is the first time the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has officially authorized the Internet and cell phone media to cover the Olympics. This authorization undoubtedly marks a milestone in the history of both news media and the Olympics. News on the Internet features strong timeliness, flexible interactive participation, abundant information content and diverse news providers. All of these features both enable the Internet media to play a significant role in the news report of the Beijing Olympics and categorize the Internet media as one of the mainstream media in China.Based on many experts'research on how the Internet media cover Olympics, this paper summarizes the major traits on how such popular Portals as sohu.com and tencent.com cover the Beijing Olympics. Those traits include the report association established between Portals and the conventional news media, a smooth flow of the information by means of Web technology, an enhancement of the interactive communication between netizens and Portals, an emphasis of the originality of the hot events and the promotion of relevant brands. In addition, the drawbacks of the Chinese Internet media are exhibited in this paper as well. These drawbacks are, for example, the de-emphasis of the Paralympics, an imbalance of the coverage on different events, the apparent mistakes in the news report, the failure of the management and sales strategies of sohu.com, the underdeveloped video technologies, etc. All of these are still the bottleneck for the Chinese Internet news media in the reports of Olympics.The Olympic coverage traits of America's commercial Net media such as yahoo.com are also summarized in this paper: an ideal combination between the Olympic coverage and life services, a search engine-supported Olympic information search, the successful integration between Olympic coverage and cell phone information services, etc. This paper also compares the performance of the Chinese Internet news media and their American counterparts in the Beijing Olympics in terms of reporting methods and quantity, the design of the Olympic webpage and the news reporting depth. The last parts of this paper offer advices to the Chinese commercial Net media, pointing out that Chinese Net media should make full use of their technological resources to satisfy netizens'needs and further promote the Olympics and the Chinese sports.