The Newspaper Business The Market-oriented Research

In the process of reform for the economic marketization, the marketization for newspaper management is a crucial issue of current significance. On the basis of the theories from both economics and mass media, a research is conducted on the issue of market drive for newspapers in China; a detailed analysis and elaboration are also made concerning the features and economic profits in the marketization for newspapers.Newspaper, as a product, has features as information product, medium product, news medium product and culture product. Thus, the newspaper industry with newspaper as one of the products in society has the investment-profit orientation, i.e. the economic orientation.As a medium product, newspaper has two groups of consumers, newspaper readers and advertisement distributors. To each group, newspaper management provides services accordingly, therefore, the cost and profit distributions are not identical, but asymmetrical.The marketization for newspaper management meets the demand of newspaper consumers and fully promotes the development of economy and society by regulating newspaper management, enhancing efficient management with fair competition and increasing economic profits.The main obstacle in the market drive for newspaper management is that both newspapers and newspaper groups are not yet a qualified and standardized market body. Newspapers and newspaper groups are institutions, and their institutional properties rights are not easy to be defined thus have no trading in the market. The issues always perplexing the marketization for newspaper management are how to combine political orientation with economic orientation, and how to give equal consideration to both social benefits and economic profits. The key to these problems lies in two aspects. On the one hand, resources in the line of newspaper are to be distributed in the market with the awareness of service strengthened and the quality of newspaper products greatly improved; on the other hand, the media administrative system under law and the supervision of mass medium from all walks of life are to be reinforced.Finally, some reviews and suggestions are proposed with comments on the prospects and trends of newspaper development in China.