Study Of Reporting Features Of Environmental News In The Green Edition Of Southern Weekend

Founded in1984, Southern Weekend is always serious Newspaperwith high credibility and the great newsweekly with the largest circulationall over the country.Southern Weekend has long-standing concern of environmental ssues,especially in2009, the new Green Edition was founded, and a high-qualityenvironmental news reporting team was built as well, which showed thegreat importance laid on the environmental reporting, and the ambition tocontinue the brand reputation on the environmental news.In this study, the news framing theory and environmental riskcommunication theory were introduced as theoretical frames, contentanalysis and framing analysis were both adopted, descriptive statisticsalong with contingency analysis were used as statistical methods to explorethe overall reporting features of the Green Edition of Southern Weekend.Then taking the PM2.5issue as a case, to deeply explore the reportingcharacteristics and risk constructing features of environmental hot topics.The results were found as below:Firstly, The depth report was used most frequently among all the newsgenres, which is consistent with the well known overall style of SouthernWeekend, and the innovative application of letters from readers shows itsactive promotion of public’s participation in the environmentalcommunication.Secondly, the majority of news report in the Green Edition cited more than single news source, which functions as a guarantee of objectivity andbalance of opinions. The most frequent used news source was thegovernmental department, who is responsible for the comments ofenvironmental events, interpretation of the environmental policy andactions.Thirdly, the main attention of Southern Weekend was on the domesticenvironmental news, with the role of supervision of public opinions ondomestic environmental issues.Fourthly, The news theme shown mostly was about environmentalprotection, and news about green industry had increased significantly inthe past year. The choice of news themes is changed significantly indifferent time periods, consistent with the emphasis and directions of theenvironmental policies.Fifthly, the main news frame in the environmental news of GreenEdition was conflict frame and accountability frame.Sixthly, after the contingency analysis, it was found that, there wassignificant difference found in the distribution of news themes in differenttime-periods, but no significance was found between the news themes andthe reporting areas. There was no significant contingency between thenews frames with time periods or reporting areas.From the case study of PM2.5issues, it was reported in line with thethree level of environmental communication characteristics: first, in thestage of factual evidence and probabilities, the news story was tocommunicate with the public about the risks, through the combination ofprofessional scientific terms, personal experience, and easy to understandinterpretation; in the stage of institutional performance, through thepositive involvement of various interest groups, a platform was createdin the newspaper for them to exchange views and discuss environmentalrisks on the basis of mutual trust; In the final phase the different values ofinterest groups was presented, and this was the conflict stage of valuesystems. By using the participatory communication, it greatly promoted the participation of the main body of the interests of all parties on the issueof environmental risk. However, the report of impact of life styles onPM2.5should be increased.