Event

This January marks the second anniversary of the Southern Weekly (Nanfang Zhoumo) incident. As a former journalist at Southern Weekly who experienced the incident, Annenberg School doctoral student Kecheng Fang will briefly review what really happened inside the newsroom and correct some common misunderstandings. He then will explain the changes of both the paper and the overall media environment in China during these two years. The tight censorship has persisted, and the financial troubles emerged because of the decline of print media. As a result, a number of investigative journalists have quit their jobs. The decline of Southern Weekly and the critical news media is accompanied with the rise of Party-sponsored digital media and the increased influence of Party mouthpieces on social networking sites. These changes reveal Xi Jinping's media control strategies.