The country’s official Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, has plans to expand coverage, just as other major official media outlets also have plans to grow. From the Associated Press:
The staid daily that chronicles the activities of the party leadership and publishes editorials praising official policies plans to expand from 16 to 20 pages with more coverage of breaking and international news, it said in a notice on its Web site Tuesday.
The newspaper’s 72 foreign and domestic bureaus will be upgraded, it said, without giving details.
[…] The moves are believed to be part of a 45 billion yuan ($6.6 billion) government plan to fund a major expansion of CCTV, People’s Daily and the official Xinhua News Agency, as reported earlier this year by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper.
Officials have yet to confirm the plan’s details, but the Post said it calls for Xinhua to nearly double its overseas bureaus to 180, while adding a 24-hour satellite news channel. CCTV would add Arabic and Russian-language channels to its international Chinese, English, French and Spanish services, the newspaper said.
More details on the planned changes, from Tan Yingzi at China Daily:
The to-be-added news pages will mainly cover China news, international news, literary commentary and feature stories. The aim is to “better spread the central government’s policies, report from both domestic and overseas fronts, strengthen the publication of the socialism theory with Chinese characteristics and Marxism literature theory,” it said.
Founded in 1948 as the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the People’s Daily is considered the most authoritative Chinese language newspaper with over 2 million readers in the country, according to its official website.
During the visit to the People’s Daily last June, President Hu Jintao asked the newspaper to enhance its capabilities to communicate at home and abroad and develop into one of the world’s top media groups.
[…] “The People’s Daily’s actual influence on Chinese society has been falling in recent years due to the competition from other newspapers,” Yu Guoming, vice-dean of the Renmin University School of Journalism and head of that university’s Public Opinion Research Institute, told China Daily Monday.
