La educación durante los gobiernos de:

a. News Values

In terms of content and news values, generally speaking, the Southern Metropolis is a daily tabloid, similar to the Times in UK, while the content has some sections (Women, Sports and Family) more like the Daily Mail. Compared to other Chinese

61 Unicom network is one of the two major Chinese telecom operators, the other one is China Telecom.

62 Chaosheng TV is an officially TV Station registered in Hong Kong, which faces to Chinese and Cantonese, features Chaoshan culture by focusing on Chaoshan merchants and their cultures.

The television media organisation headquarter is in Hong Kong. The website address is

newspapers, Southern Metropolis has more western news values because the newspaper is more focused on investigative reporting (for example the “Sun Zhigang” incident and SARS reporting in 2013). At the same time, like all print media, Southern is under the censorship by local government and this limits its news reporting and this also limits the news values it can have.

Its readers are mainly between 25 to 44 years old with higher education background and white collar in China who are the targets of advertisers. These audiences pay more attention to the quality life, valued brand and high quality products. They are positive customers and very interested in real estate and automotive products.

Gou Ye, the CEO of Southern Metropolis Media Transformation, currently says, journalists still hold newspaper-centric mindset and put more effort on general reporting (interview, 2013). Gou (interview, 2013) feels that media convergence is not just a business, but also a “Media +Platform” strategy. Gou believes that in a successful digital model, “media” should be always put in the first place. On the other hand a “platform” should have utilities and industrial properties which can be developed and grown bigger and stronger in news market.

The basics news values of the Southern Metropolis are not changing – they are more catering to local readers’ interests and social responsibility. The Southern Metropolis takes its news values and social responsibility as the first principle when running the multimedia platforms. Therefore, the generalization of core values has not changed. For the Southern Metropolis, its core value is to be “a recorder of social process, an opinion expresser, a modern society breeder, an advisor as well as a civic consciousness enlightener.”

There is some evidence that reporters wish they could follow more like Western survey style or investigative type of news values (Gou, interview, 2013). Gou also says reporters would like to transit from general news stories reporting to current

affairs reporting and comment writing. Gou (interview, 2013) emphasized that the most crucial thing for the transformation in the Southern Metropolis is the ultimate mission of responsibility for social values and social enlightenment.

Gou summed up three transforming directions in terms of news value:

The first news value he wishes to change is the speed of reporting:

“Today, we are in the era of the information is more and more developed. All the information if you left it until the next day, it has been 24 hours later to see it, does it still make any sense to you? ” Mo Li, Editor of Guangzhou news department (interview, 2013)

The second news values which is also changing, is an increasing focus on entertainment. For example “Mesh” section which concerns major and funny news from other newspapers and websites has different news values from previous.

Thirdly, Gou (Interview, 2013) believes that in the future, the Southern Metropolis needs more so-called citizen journalists to help breaking news reporting. Because, Internet and BBS network (Bulletin Board System) as mass media obviously have advantages, which cannot be ignored by any media organization, particularly in terms of content producing and interaction compared to newspapers.

b. News Sources

Due to the social-media (Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, Weichat) is more and more popular, in terms of spreading speed, newspapers lost the advantages of breaking news reporting (Gou, interview, 2013). Sometimes, without the citizen journalists’

help, newspaper reporters are difficult to show the whole picture of the breaking news, not to mention the exclusive coverage.

Media convergence has brought two changing aspects of news source in Southern Metropolis. Previously, reporters were assigned to interview and write general news stories for the newspaper. Now, editors and reporters interact with citizens who would like providing perspectives (news value) and clues for the story.

Secondly, multimedia platforms help the Southern Metropolis to find new clues (news source) on the Internet. For example, stories on “Guangzhou Breakfast” are some sources collected from Weibo. “Data Reading” is a new section based on online journalists’ data analysis – also known as data journalism.

Gou (interview, 2013) said this is probably the future of traditional or professional media-- in the future: Southern Metropolis has to be a mass (citizen) media. Gou (interview, 2013) gives some ideal transformation ideas of news sources, although those ideas are still under planning. The first is “do something but not everything”.

For example, Gou (interview, 2013) said in the future, “if we complete the transformation, ideally we could only choose major affairs and broken news to report instead of asking people to gather everything back, in this case there are more reporters available working in the back-end, processing and verification stories”.

c. News Selection

Digital formats (Weibo) have changed the publication cycle. For example, when the news event comes out, the first choice is to put it on the newspaper’s official Weibo site. At the same time, other digital media (Network, radio online and Wechat) will spread this out immediately. Gou (interview, 2013) stressed that now Southern Metropolis has more than 4 million followers on Weibo.

As noted in the section on news values, in China traditionally, newspapers have limited opinion space and editorial freedom. And this heavily affects the publish time and freedom on those investigative reporting (the official ban will cancel the particular reporting on the print whenever Chinese government gives the order).

However, this situation has changed in the multimedia era. Now, if there is a sensitive story, the editors will assess its risks for the newspaper. If most of the editors believe this article should not be reported on the paper, then it will be published online only. This means even some sensitive issues come out, stories could be open to the public without intervene from regulatory authorities.

For example, a social media like Weibo has helped the Southern Metropolis releasing news stories before the paper received the official ban. Mo (interview, 2013) explained that when the propaganda department reported a ban order, the paper chose to publish the message via Weibo immediately: “Even I do not know if Weibo will be blocked in the future, but typically there will be a few hours before the ban order issued, usually at night, we will spread news in short message or long story before the ban sent down.”

Another example, in 2012 is the “House Uncle” Case. This was about Mr. Cai Bin who was the former commissar of Guangzhou City Management Comprehensive Law Enforcement Bureau Panyu Branch. He was exposed on an Internet, as owning more than 20 sets of real estate and bribery of 2.75million RMB during his tenure.

He was suspended and sentenced to eleven and half years. In this case, Mo (interview, 2013) said editor assessed its risks, “we judge this article to see it should be reported on the print or not, and estimate the ban will come, so we prefer to publish this reporting on Weibo first.”

In China, there was an official ban of withdraw or postpone some sensitive reporting before the print get published. In the previous, there is a lot of things had to be hidden in dark. However, the appearance of digital media means that although the print is still under the government’s control, digital media has changed and promoted the Freedom of the Press in terms of news selection with greater editorial freedom.

“Because of the multiple methods to publish, now we can find out basically there is no story can be hidden away” Mo said (interview, 2013).