From the South China Morning Post, (registration required):
In a bid to raise China’s voice on the world stage and compete with Western media, Beijing is planning to assign an elite team of 100 specially trained journalists to the staff of leading state-run media outlets.
Under a programme that began last year, Beijing Foreign Studies University, the capital’s Tsinghua University, Communication University of China and Renmin University, and Shanghai’s Fudan University have each enrolled about 20 hand-picked postgraduate students in two-year master of journalism courses that will provide talent for the likes of Xinhua news agency, China Central Television and China Daily.
A recruiter at Beijing Foreign Studies University’s department of international journalism and communications said the students were the first batch to receive multidisciplinary training specifically aimed at extending the international reach of state-run news outlets. “The Communist Party’s Central Committee has required agencies in charge of international communications to work more closely with the designated schools and, in return, the universities will get extra funding,” he said.
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Dr Zhang Zhian, of Fudan University’s journalism school, said the March 14 riots in Tibet were a major trigger behind the central government’s push to expand state-run media organisations – including the journalist training programme – because the authorities were disturbed by what they perceived as biased coverage in Western media.“The unfriendly coverage in foreign media led [authorities] to discover that China is still insignificant in terms of a voice internationally,” Zhang said. “To better tell the world about China, the country needs to train plenty of journalists specialising in international communication.”
