Newspaper Economy and Newspaper Management

Author: Tang Xujun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: In the 20 years since the reform and opening-up, the most significant change in China's newspaper industry may be its shift in survival methods. During the planned economy era, newspapers were cultural public institutions, with their primary income source being the sale of newspapers, while the shortfall was supplemented by the state treasury or higher-level units. Their fundamental tasks were to disseminate information and conduct publicity. However, since 1978, when several major news outlets in the capital, including People's Daily, jointly proposed the operational principle of "public institution, enterprise management," China's newspaper industry gradually began to "wean itself off" government financial support and eventually adopted a self-funded, tax-paying, self-reliant, and self-developing corporate management model. While the newspaper industry shouted for the reform and opening-up and heralded the establishment of the socialist market economy system, it also immersed itself in the market, developing into a new emerging industry in the information age. With this profound change in the survival methods of the newspaper industry, newspaper economics and newspaper management began to become the focus of attention for those involved in running newspapers. However, like all reforms in all sectors of China, the practice of newspaper management reform has always been ahead of theory. When readers' choices became the decisive factor for the survival of newspapers, the theoretical community was still debating whether newspapers were "commodities"; when advertising became the economic foundation of the newspaper industry, the theoretical community was still cautiously arguing about whether the concept of "market" could be introduced into the newspaper industry; and when corporate capital haded into the newspaper industry in various ways, the theoretical community was still exploring whether the economic forms of the newspaper industry could be diversified. This situation indicates that the theory in this field is severely lagging behind practice. Since the 1990s, with the gradual intensification of competition in the newspaper industry, theoretical research on newspaper economics and management has begun to attract attention from all sides. Seminars at various levels have been held one after another, and collections of papers on various themes have been published one after another. Although various perspectives........