Newsrooms changing

William Dean Singleton, chief executive of MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper companies in the United States, said the print industry was not declining but changing.

"We have to be much more judicious in how we gather news," he told Forbes magazine in a recent interview.

"Most newsrooms have fewer people than they did five years ago, and they'll continue to have fewer."

Changes are taking place in China's newsrooms, too.

Zhang Yanping, head of Beijing Youth Daily, said that compared with the Internet, whose storage capacity for information is virtually infinite, newspapers compose a medium with limited space.

To brave the challenges, publishers will then have to choose the most valuable information to meet the needs of the readers.

Peng Lan, author of "The First Decade of Internet Media in China," said on Monday that TV and radio programmes in China have increasingly improved their timeliness in reporting under the pressure from Internet media.

Many print outlets have adopted forms such as "background links," which are popular in the Internet medium, she said.

More directly, traditional media are using the Internet to help identify what the public wants.

One example is a recent newspaper report on the "most beautiful women journalists." The website www.dahe.cn, run by Henan Newspaper Group in Central China, first covered the story of Cao Aiwen, a reporter with the Henan Television Station, who stopped an interview on July 10 to help save the life of a 13-year-old girl who had fallen into a river.

The story was picked up later by local and national newspapers. Some netizens proposed awarding Cao the title of "most beautiful woman journalist" an idea published in mainstream newspapers.

"This case has great significance in the study of mass communications," said Dong Lin, a www.dahe.cn executive.

Ye Shuimao, deputy chief of Zhong'an Online (China Anhui Online), the biggest portal in East China's Anhui Province, said more and more "marriages" between newspapers and commercial dotcoms has been taking place in China in recent years.

Zhong'an Online is an integration of China Anhui web with the Anhui Daily Press Group, and similar "win-win" partnerships have been forged in Central China's Hunan Province and South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Ye said.

Except those run by newspapers, commercial websites in China are not entitled to conduct interviews as news organizations do, according to relevant State regulations.

That may have explained why Chen Tong, editor-in-chief of Sina.com, said he believed there was more co-operation than competition between Internet and traditional media.

If he's right, that means the 800-pound gorilla and traditional media will cross-breed and grow into an even larger hybrid.

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