When I first saw the course title online journalism I wondered what it like is. Soon I found out online journalism in UK is totally different from that in China.
There are online journalists in UK. They are writing news stories for the platform of internet, while in China there’s no such type of work.
In China there are people working for the websites, but they are technological staff rather than reporters. There are editors but their main job is finding news stories from newspapers and changing titles to more sensational ones to attract viewers’ eyes.
In China the websites don’t have the rights to interview or to report. One of reasons is that internet is too free to be controlled.
But there is online journalism in China, but it has a total different meaning than that in UK.
Reporters in China find news clues on the internet, and report stories happened on the internet, the heated discussion on tianya, the most popular BBS in China, that’s the online journalism in China.
Journalists treat the internet as a golden mine for news clues, because nowadays Chinese like to express their opinion on the internet, some of them would reveal interesting stories in their blog or in online forum.
Largest Forum in China
In most Chinese journalists’ minds, there is no concept of writing news stories for the search engine. Many of them have never heard of Jakob Nielsen. So it’s easy to find that on Chinese news websites all the news materials are mostly pasted from newspapers.
Has anyone considered of changing the news style to cater to viewers? I believe that’s one of things I could bring back to China. Even though as a person working in the news website we could not interview or report by ourselves, but we could begin with changing the writing style and use multimedia to prepare for the real online journalism coming to China.
