Audience Strategies of Contemporary Chinese Media: A Study Centered on Audience Identity

Author: Zhang Chunlin / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2006-01-01
Features: The shift from a transmitter-centered approach to an audience-centered approach is an inevitable choice for the development of China's media. In this process of transformation, it is crucial for media to successfully implement their audience strategies. This book aligns with this shift in media development and conducts a valuable exploration of media audience strategies. Against the international backdrop of media globalization and the domestic context of media industrialization, the book draws on research findings from disciplines such as sociology, economics, and political science. It examines the evolution of audience identity during social transformation from three dimensions: diachronic analysis, synchronic analysis, and categorical analysis, focusing on the audience strategies of contemporary Chinese media. The research approach of this book is as follows: Starting from the broader context of China's social transformation, it analyzes the patterns and trends of audience identity changes, and then uses these insights to discuss the adjustments in media strategies. This approach can be represented by the following progressive relationship. The basic framework of the book is divided into three parts: the upper part conducts a diachronic analysis of media audience strategies, the middle part conducts a synchronic analysis, and the lower part conducts a categorical analysis.
3. From the perspective of information distribution, the one-sided, politicized, and simplistic propaganda and indoctrination have resulted in overall low-quality information. Liang Heng, when discussing the development of the newspaper industry, stated that "the fundamental attributes of newspapers are four: informational, political, cultural, and commercial." "In addition to disseminating information, newspapers also serve six major functions: publicity and education, guiding work, popularizing knowledge, providing entertainment, and criticism and supervision."① Of course, this discussion is equally applicable to other media forms such as radio, television, and the internet. In fact, during the pre-marketization stage, China placed excessive emphasis on the political attributes of news media while weakening and simplifying other attributes; it strengthened the publicity and education function while weakening and simplifying other functions. This situation was first exemplified by newspapers. In September 1949, Hu Qiaojun, the Deputy Minister of the Central Propaganda Department, spoke at a meeting of local branch representatives of the Xinmin Daily in Beijing, expressing hope that the newspaper would become "a popular organ of the government." After the establishment of the News and Publication Administration, all newspapers were required to fulfill the function of guiding central tasks, and many private newspapers followed the propaganda of party newspapers, gradually losing their own characteristics②. With the completion of the socialist transformation of the newspaper industry and the formation of a single newspaper structure model dominated by party newspapers, the homogenization of newspapers in news publicity and the simplistic illustration of politics became even more prominent. During the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Anti-Rightist Movement," newspaper propaganda severely violated the basic principles of news authenticity, with distorted political attributes and the function of publicity and education becoming its main connotations. During the "Cultural Revolution," the People's Daily, the People's Liberation Army Daily, and the Red Flag magazine became the models for national media publicity, and the mechanical pattern of "small newspapers copying large newspapers, and large newspapers copying Liang Xiao" became the rigid response of media to audiences. P51