Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, August 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Aug. 27, 2009). "Department of Political Science." Includes bibliographical references (p. 120-128).

This thesis focuses on the impact of media convergence on the Chinese newspaper organization in the global text of advanced technology, through a rare ethnographic case study of a Chinese Communist Party media organization. Based on online and offline data obtained through seven months' ethnographic research carried out in 2016 at Party newspaper organization PaperX, including a special focus on the newspaper's police beat, it seeks to understand how the impact of media convergence is manifested in news routines and to discuss the implications of the impact on Chinese journalists. The research was designed during a time of change in China's media environment. On August 18, 2014, the country's leader, President Xi Jinping, also General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, gave a speech highlighting the "Directives on Boosting Integrated Development of Traditional and New Media" , a new set of guidelines to assist traditional media in handling the economic downturn that started to affect the Chinese newspaper industry from 2012 as the penetration of digital technologies deepened. In a similar way to Western media, Chinese newsrooms have needed to adapt to Internet structures in news production. Unlike Western media, Chinese newsroom development is subject to strong political guidance. Media convergence in China thus represents a culturally specific phenomenon within the global landscape of newspaper industry digitalization. The sociology of newsroom studies and the labor lens are the two main research approaches adopted to address the purposes of this thesis. The thesis uses newsroom studies to examine the impact of media convergence as a logic institutionalized into the newsroom structure, journalists' routines and practices, and the identity construction of journalists. Through the labor lens approach, the research explores individual journalists' praxis in the changing media environment in China and the constant shift between alienation, de-alienation and enlightened alienation. Two tensions continuously emerge throughout the research: old versus new values and practices; and individual versus structural needs of the profession. Findings indicates that media convergence logic has had multiple impacts reaching to the core of journalistic practice at PaperX. At the structural level, the re-centralization of media control closed down local support for PaperX, particularly the limited latitude previously granted to the newspaper by local government departments to "supervise" (serve as a watchdog), while financial support from the government (both local and central levels) saw the newspaper adopt an administratization of advertising operational strategy focused on soliciting and making government information service reports and announcements. Such structural changes appeared to have a paradoxical effect on journalists' perceptions of their job, with staffers being both insecure and apathetic about their current work and proud to be connected to government sources. The principles directing the organization and journalists in their routines and practices changed to become "official" oriented. Yet, journalists were found to project informal and invisible practices to reconcile their paradoxical feelings about their work. Meanwhile, at the identity level, journalists actively reconstructed their professional identity on social media to showcase the products of their work to government officials and managers on the WeChat Moments social media platform, and to display their close connections with the police, using these contacts as resources to boost the social authority derived from their identity. Overall, this study's contribution lies in its insights into Chinese newsroom production in the global context of advanced technology, in its deployment of ethnographic data gathering, and the use of the labor lens perspective to analyze journalists' relationship with their organization and media institutions. The documenting of PaperX's experiences in adapting to the new era of newsgathering in China could also shed significant light on the future development of Chinese Communist Party newspapers at the local level.

The central question in this thesis is what are the interrelationships between the news media and those at the center of power and how do these shape the role the media play in democratic processes, particularly since neoliberal reforms in 1991. More specifically, this research attempts to illuminate journalistic practice and the factors that influence it, at the intersection of political and economic interests in what is often described as a crony capitalist polity (Kohli, 2007; Varshney, 2000). This has been done by examining three case studies that represented the interests of those at the center of power and the growing collusion between the state and private capital that has been a mark of the polity's neoliberal turn (Chandrashekhar, 2014). Each of these - the Nira Radia conversations that exposed the nexus between private capital and the state, the news media's coverage of the political elite, mainly the Gandhi family and the leader of the Hindu majoritarian political party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Narendra Modi, and lastly, the media's coverage of India's richest business house Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and its owner Mukesh Ambani - was marked by extensive self-censorship by the national mainstream news media. The theoretical architecture underpinning this project draws on three major approaches - political economy, field theory and new institutional theory provides a framework sufficiently sensitive to the range of pressures and influences journalism is subject to. This research draws on forty semi-structured, in-depth interviews with forty journalists and editors who were directly involved in the editorial processes of each of these news stories. The salient finding of this project is that the field of journalism has been subject to regular incursions from the field of power, particularly when political and economic interests are aligned, such that the field of journalism collapses in the field of power resulting in the need to reassess Bourdieu's claim that fields, however heteronomous, possess a degree of autonomy. This research finds that journalism is not merely embedded in the field of power, it plays a more pernicious role after economic liberalization. It becomes an active participant in negotiating and consolidating the dominant coalition of economic and political interests on which the polity rests. In other words, it is recruited by the field of power in institutionalizing crony capitalism. However, the self-censorship could not be sustained and unraveled, albeit briefly, in each of these cases. Contradictions between the macro forces induced by the consolidation of democracy, dissensus within the elite and constitutional limits circumscribing power are some of the variables that allow for interstices of journalistic autonomy. Thus, new institutionalism's insistence on retaining the political elided by both political economy and field theory, is valuable. Lastly, this research foregrounds the role played by journalistic agency in upholding the democratic mission of journalism.