| Chinese mainstream media institutions are launching an enthusiastic pursuit of media convergence particularly in entering and expanding the global market.This effort is widely understood as an attempt to seize the opportunity provided by the social media as a promising field of public communication and thus re-establish the unbalanced international order of media communication.Up to now,China’s three mainstream media have all opened their official accounts on international renown social media platforms.And this thesis intends to conduct a case analysis of Xinhua News Agency’s official account on Twitter to explore how it tells the Chinese stories and what stories has been told there.This thesis,based on the theory of new media logic,adopts van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar as analyical tools,tried to answer following questions:(1)What kind of traditional media logic and new media logic are adopted by China Xinhua News in constructing China’s image and how a hybrid media logic is reflected?(2)What kind of cooperation and conflicts between a Chinese traditional media and an international social media platform are reflected in such hybrid media system?and hopefully by exploring the two research questions,this research can cast light on the deliberation of our future international communication strategies.The thesis extracted 467 tweets about China issued by China Xinhua News,official Twitter account of Xinhua News Agency and analyzed how it depicted China’s image from 6 aspects including economy,politics,culture and sports,society,ecology and sci-tech.This thesis found out a hybrid media logic adopted by China Xinhua News in operating its official Twitter account.On the one hand,China Xinhua News regards attention-drawing as a news value and tries to take advantage of platform algorithms such as hashtag to drive information stream and distribution of information among like-minded people.While on the other,Xinhua News Agency does not abandon its traditional role as gatekeeper and thus still adheres to its traditional practices and norms.Cautious moves are taken in terms of discursive strategies.While taking various conventional and unconventional means to construct a positive self,few of its discourses are depicting a negative other,which is rather exceptional considering van Dijk’s discovery of media institutions’ persistent construction of the ideological square with the other always depicted as negative.The thesis also sees both cooperation and conflict between the discourse of Chinese mainstream media and western social networks.Firstly,discourses with Chinese characteristics still prevail in tweets on fields that were much reported by traditional media.Secondly,China Xinhua News tries to cater to western social media discourses by adopting more vivid language styles in some soft news,in an effort to draw closer distance with audience and covey humanistic feelings and universal values.Last but not least,China Xinhua News also takes innovative attempt to combat against the western discourses in depicting China,trying to reverse their stereotypes against China in some aspects.And to make better use of social media platform for Chinese mainstream media in international communication,this thesis suggests that Chinese mainstream media needs to make more in-depth use of algorithmic functions of social media platforms to increase connectivity with other users.Besides,the news agency can gradually include user generated content to their tweets,probably beginning from soft news or from news on social movements.It may also take advantage of social media’s instantaneity to make more coverage on breaking news.And live tweets may be more widely adopted in contents that meets audience taste to invite more interactions and increase click rate.Also,journalists of Xinhua News Agency can open their personal Twitter to form an interaction with the organization account,providing another way of promoting tweets sent by China Xinhua News. |
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