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Everyone survived the launch and then came the critics, and warnings that making the big leagues would take more work. “Here we were in the beginning... ten people working in a small room where we had to stand up – there were no chairs – to where we are now, which is nice well-equipped offices. The resources here have never really compared to a US TV venture,” Bartelt sighs, in part because China has so many more people to fuel an enterprise. However, technical resources here are thinner, and CNC is under-subscribed to secondary feed sources such as Reuters, so the quality that sophisticated international audiences would expect in their news service of choice just isn’t there. CNN and Al Jezeera will continue to dominate, warned Li Xiguang of Tsinghua’s School of Journalism, because potential global audiences will be squeezed into insignificance by the reach of the first and the popularity of the second. Both, he noted, pay high salaries to top-notch journalists.
CNC is fed by Xinhua, the short term for the state news agency with correspondents “on the ground” in hundreds of bureaus around the world; it does so beside competing state-owned newspapers and the CCTV empire (Central China Television). Why a new station? Representing China is a legitimate agenda, and the leadership of this new venture is clear that the channel is not a propaganda organ, but China’s vehicle for telling its own stories about itself in its own way.
“My Chinese colleagues realize reaching our full potential
is not going to happen overnight.”
But if China-watchers at newspapers like The Guardian and assorted other critics are right – that the new station is part of China’s soft power push – some changes in China’s approach to its media sector may be in order. News coverage here has been subject to stipulations about what you can say and even how you can say it. Bartelt voices her concerns, “How China-based news agencies will compete if this does not relax somewhat is the big unanswered question.” In the meantime, objectivity and meticulous research are the goal posts she wants staff to focus on, and the competition may heat up with the entry of independents like Bon Live.
No question she is on board with CNC’s underdog mission: “Asia has no big voice in international news coverage and I respect them immensely for trying to make this happen.” It was a kind of “build it and they will watch” kind of venture, as Bartelt tells it. “In America the mindset would be to first see who would be interested in the proposed content and then systematically tailoring it and formulating a game plan. Here the mindset is we’ll learn as we go. They built the service first, are now looking at how to market it and what quality controls to exercise.” There is a new push on all those fronts; CNC has made deals with content providers and are working on cooperative deals with several media agencies.
Witness to the growing pains, Bartelt looks back on the launch with some pride, “It is one of the most challenging ventures to undertake, because you are not only working on the business side, you are working with journalism, and journalism has its own sort of standards it needs to meet – so merging business and journalism and doing it in a different culture has been incredibly interesting.” Some days it is likely she meant interesting as in the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
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