Multimedia journalism: A comparative study of six news web sites in China and the UK.

Abstract

China and the United Kingdom are countries which differ greatly, not least in traditional and new media. This paper will consider a number of structural and content issues around the output of mainstream multimedia journalism in these two very different news markets. Through a detailed comparative textual analysis of three major news web sites in each of the two countries, it will examine ways in which contemporary information technology and recently-evolved epistemological, linguistic and aesthetic conventions in communicating news and current affairs narratives affect multimedia reporting on mainstream online news websites. The paper presents the latest results of a detailed content analysis of interactive multimedia reporting in China and the UK on three randomly-chosen days over a period of two months. The data set was derived from a range of different media organisations exhibiting sufficient commonalities of objective and perspective to allow relevant comparisons to be made between practices in multimedia news journalism in the two countries. In China, Xinhua Wang is a state news agency whose main public presence is online, while Nandu Wang and Renming Wang are newspapers with identifiably left-leaning and right-leaning tendencies respectively in their political outlook. In the UK, the BBC is a public service broadcaster operating nonetheless at some distance from government, but which makes extensive use of its online presence to post journalistic content on domestic and international news web sites, while The Guardian and The Telegraph are both newspapers that are situated on the left and right of UK politics respectively.