Book Review: Digital Journalism in China

The increasingly evolved and digitalized media landscapes have prompted the development of digital journalism studies, which look into the unprecedented transformations, challenges, and disruptions experienced by journalism as a profession, industry, and academic discipline. Digital Journalism in China, edited by Shixin Ivy Zhang, is a timely addition to this emerging and ever-changing research field, presenting an overview of the status quo of digital journalism in China through the lens of methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical discussions, as well as detailed case studies of representative Chinese news agencies.

This collection of essays starts with an introduction by Shixin Ivy Zhang and Jing Meng, which proposes several questions concerning the similarity and differences between digital journalism in China and the West and briefly summarizes the eight contributions in the volume. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 set the scene, approaching digital journalism from a theoretical aspect. In Chapter 2, Jiang Chang and Runze Ding apply the Delphi technique, which identifies consensus by collecting opinions from a group of experts, to explore shared understandings of well-established Chinese and foreign scholars regarding conceptualizing and researching digital journalism. Chapter 3 by Haiyan Wang and Lin Wu has a thorough literature review of Chinese academic discourse of digital journalism, arguing that the three dimensions frequently examined in current Chinese literature are technology, industry, and policy, but with a lack of attention to the professional and social aspects of digital journalism in China.

The next three chapters depict the transformed journalistic practices in China’s legacy media. Under pressure to appeal to younger audiences and gain more visibility on digital platforms, even state-owned media has succumbed to audience metrics and embraced popular journalism and tabloidization without hesitation. The fourth and fifth chapters tap into the popularization and tabloidization of China’s party media. In Chapter 4, Xin Xin focuses on a three-minute video made by Xinhua News Agency that primarily aims to promote the “Four Comprehensives” policy proposed by President Xi. Her qualitative analysis of the video and other related paratextual materials reveals traces of personalization, popular productivity, and informal language, all of which are prominent features of popular journalism. Chapter 5, by Kecheng Fang, employs quantitative analysis to identify some salient patterns of tabloidization, such as coverage of more diverse topics and frequent employment of emotional appeals in WeChat articles posted by People’s Daily and CCTV. He then further triangulates the research using qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with social media editors involved in the process. Fang contends that top-down guidance, bottom-up innovation, and peer competition contribute to the prevalence of tabloidized social media content produced by China’s Party media. In Chapter 6, Dan Wang gathers qualitative data in a digital newsroom to observe the professional socialization process of newly recruited journalists. He concludes that the young journalists lack the tacit knowledge required for web editors, something that can only be passed from experienced journalists to novice journalists via interactions. Despite their familiarity with technical skills, the young journalists are short of various types of knowledge, like the ability to identify potential news stories, check sources and follow political rules when covering sensitive topics.

Chapter 7 by Luming Zhao and Jiaxi Peng is relevant to another buzzword in digital journalism, platformization, which delineates the migration of journalistic content produced by media outlets to various digital platforms. In their contribution, Zhao and Peng have addressed why and how a prestigious and popular Chinese digital newspaper has adopted platformization from a sociological aspect. Based on qualitative data collected from interviews and fieldwork, they have noted the traces of ‘quasi-platformization’ in investigating a popular state-funded Chinese digital newspaper, which may be universal to all Chinese official media as they balance the relations of openness, innovation, and censorship. Chapter 8, authored by Chengju Huang, is the only comparative study in this volume. It analyzes the printed editions of two daily newspapers, one based in China and the other in Australia. The different paths taken by the two newspapers confronted with digitalization and fierce competition have reflected the current Chinese and Australian media environments. Meanwhile, Chapter 9 shifts the research focus from newsrooms to classrooms in Hong Kong. Steve Zhongshi Guo and Dan Wang interviewed students and educators in Hong Kong to identify gaps between journalism education and professional practice and propose possible solutions to close them in the digital age. The volume ends with a conclusion that addresses the questions mentioned in the first chapter and underlines the importance of more “interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and comparative analyses” (Zhang and Meng, 2022: 117) to further extend the research scope and enhance our understanding of digital journalism in China.

This collection of essays has extended the research scope of digital journalism studies from at least two aspects. First, this volume aims to de-westernize the current literature concerning digital journalism by offering “a comparative perspective” through the lens of China’s alternative model (Wang, 2022: 1431). To further diversify digital journalism studies, it is essential to include more non-western perspectives and voices (Witschge and Deuze, 2020: 364). The essays of this edited volume elaborate on how digital technologies have impacted journalists, newsrooms, media policies, and journalistic research and teaching within the Chinese context. Second, this collection demonstrates the vigor of digital journalism studies as an interdisciplinary field, as shown in the numerous approaches adopted by contributors of this volume.

While the volume has covered many fascinating aspects of digital journalism in China, the collection could have benefited from looking at innovative and novel formats of digital journalism, such as audiovisual news products posted on TikTok and Bilibili. Also, most of the content focuses on news media in the Chinese mainland. The volume might be more representative by adding research on the media outlets based in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.

Despite these minor flaws, this volume will surely prompt more scholarly attention to the uniqueness of the Chinese media context. It will be an enlightening reading for any students or scholars interested in the development and evolution of the digitalized Chinese media landscape.