%0 Journal Article
%T The Paper Janus: How exceptionalism based on regaining influence and doing new media help a Chinese mobile news app negotiate censorship for better journalism
%A Jianguo Deng
%J Communication and the Public
%@ 2057-0481
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/2057047318770466
%X Amid fleeing audience from the state legacy news media to the varied and vociferous new media, the Chinese government launched a mobile news app The Paper (Pengpai) in 2014 in Shanghai as a pilot test of digital journalism to ˇ°regain lost influence.ˇ± This seemingly against-the-tide expensive news project makes one wonder: How did The Paper come about and what is its nature? As a government-funded digital media, what old and new strategies have its journalists used in its marketing and content-making to achieve the designated goal of regaining lost influence/win public trust? Through in-depth interviews, this article finds the following: (1)The Paper is a product of patron-clientelism based on a consensus among imperatives of the legitimacy-seeking Party, Confucian-minded and job-losing journalists, and the quality-information-hungry public; (2) as it operates, The Paper has learned to speak both digitally and differently; (3) much like a Janus, its news executives initially used different narratives to the Party and the public to curry favor from both; (4) The Paper used both old and new strategies to negotiate with the censors, most notably two new exceptionalist discourses of ˇ°regaining influenceˇ± and ˇ°doing new media.ˇ± The author suggests that, using this exceptionalism trope, The Paper and a score of its clones across China have led Chinese journalism into a phase of ˇ°influence-seeking Communist new media-ism (2014¨Cnow),ˇ± during which Chinese journalists, while honing their digital abilities to propagandize China, have produced some quality digital journalism in public interest with the Party paying the bill
%K Censorship
%K China
%K digital story-telling
%K discursive tools
%K exceptionalism
%K journalism
%K patron-clientelism
%K professionalism
%K strategies
%K The Paper (Pengpai)
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2057047318770466