Chinese media needs to improve to compete

Of course, domestic media's disadvantage in reporting the incident is not entirely due to the subjective factors. Given that the world's core aviation technologies are still dominated by Western developed countries, understandably the Western media can get a head start in learning technical information. Nevertheless the coverage of the incident has exposed many problems with the Chinese media. For instance, the Chinese media has been over-reliant on the conferences and press releases, but such a traditional way of reporting works only when the official release is timely and authoritative, and it certainly did not work well in the case of this ill-fated jet.

Besides, in recent years the Chinese media has been obsessed with the so-called We-media, over-stressing the possibility of everyone being a journalist in the digital age. The fact is this is rarely a subject of discussion in Western media circle where there is a high professional threshold and a journalist is supposed to spend years learning and practicing to become a specialist in his or her reporting beats and develop their personal connections.

In China, the threshold is comparatively low, and journalists as a whole are young and less experienced, and at some point, the media industry runs in a speculative fashion, with journalists putting little effort into a specific subject area and instead putting all their energy into wooing followers on social media.

In 2012, the General Administration of Press and Publication outlined a going-out strategy under the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15) for the press and publication industries. As the world's second-largest economy, China needs to make its voices heard in the international community, and the going-out strategy for the Chinese media thus suits China's fundamental interests. Chinese media's performance in covering the missing plane incident, nevertheless, is strong evidence that advanced reporting equipment and technologies do not guarantee world-class reporting. The country's development of journalistic soft power still has a long way to go, so do Chinese journalists, who need to do a better job in ferreting out the truth and informing the public.

A Chinese version of the article appeared in Dongfang Daily.