Metaphor and Entertainment presents the very first, large-scale exploration of metaphor in Chinese online entertainment news, one of the most vibrant and controversial news genres in contemporary China.
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In contemporary China, the news media platforms are becoming ever more crowded. Although television, radio and print newspapers are still the conventional channels that keep people informed about whatâs happening around them and in the world, more and more people are choosing to read news on Internet-connected computers, mobile phones and other devices. Apparently, the news landscape is shifting from traditional media outlets to the Internet and mobile media outlets. Although television news still holds the largest proportion of the audience, the number of online news consumers is rapidly growing.
According to Zhong (2002), the development of online news media in China can be roughly divided into three stages: (1) 1995â1997, âthe Pioneering Stageâ, represented by the launch of the electronic version of Zhongguo Maoyi Bao (China Trade News) in 1995; (2) 1997â1999, âthe Second Revolutionâ: during this period, many print newspapers and magazines created their own online versions; (3) 2000âpresent, âthe Booming Stage of Online Newsâ: online news media that are independent from print newspapers and are commercially run have appeared and flourished in China. Nowadays, the official online news websites (e.g.
www.xinhua.org and
www.people.com.cn) coexist and interact with commercial online news portals (e.g.
www.sina.com.cn
and www.sohu.com). Online news media in China are also established on national, regional, provincial and municipal levels.
Entertainment news: news that both entertains and is about entertainment; it is news about the popular entertainment industry (movie, TV and pop music), and at the same time, it is commercial news that targets ordinary urban citizens and aims to entertain them (see Chapter 2 for details).
Infotainment: ârefers to an explicit genre-mix of âinformationâ and âentertainmentâ in news and current affairs programminâ (Thussu 2007: 9).
Although this is a significant phenomenon, which has been investigated by numerous Chinese researchers, it has not yet attracted much attention among researchers in English-speaking countries. Within Chinese media and journalism, many have noted that âentertainment newsâ as a genre has flooded TV, print media and the Internet, and has gradually become an integral part of Chinese peopleâs lives (Li 2002). Three key factors in the rise of entertainment news are widely identified in the literature: increasing diversification in forms of entertainment, the rise of culture industries, and the mediaâs commercialisation or need for market share. While forms of entertainment were centrally controlled and extremely limited during the Cultural Revolution, entertainment, broadly defined, is a part of life for Chinese in the post-Mao era: they can enjoy themselves by watching TV, going to cinemas, listening to music, surfing online or participating in many other forms of entertainment at any time of any day. The growing demand for entertainment has caused the expansion of Chinaâs culture industry, of which entertainment is an essential part. According to the Report on Development of Chinaâs Culture Industry (Zhang et al. 2005), the culture industry has seen a dramatic increase in revenues, which accounted for 3.1 per cent of GDP in 2003. In the same year, urban residentsâ expenditure on cultural and entertainment services increased by 52 per cent.
The revitalisation of entertainment in everyday life and the boom in the culture and entertainment industries have provided a social and economic environment for the transformation of news media into a highly commercialised, market-driven industry. Since the late 1980s, people in the print news media industry have been aware of the market opportunity for turning news into entertainment for ordinary urban readers, instead of simply providing an elite readership with news concerning the Party and government activities and policies. This was shown by the birth of a large number of evening newspapers from the middle of the 1980s on, and of city newspapers from the mid-1990s on. These reader-oriented newspapers are heavily laden with soft news and infotainment, and have become fierce market competitors of the propaganda-oriented Party newspapers (Huang 2001). From the late 1990s on, online news media began to take a share of the market (Li 2002), making entertainment news one of their major drawing cards. With their daily reports on entertainment activities and the lives of celebrity entertainers, entertainment news provides readers with information on daily entertainment, and at the same time, projects various entertainment circles as glamorous, mysterious or even chaotic, worlds apart from the everyday life of most citizens. In recent years, entertainment news has tended to focus on reporting or gossiping about entertainersâ private affairs, scandals and other dark issues. This phenomenon not only makes many people perceive the entertainment world as a place full of chaos and confusion, but has also frequently been criticised. In 2009 it attracted attention from âthe authoritiesâ, who control or at least âsuperviseâ media outlets and are now so concerned with the negative impact of news on the society that they sometimes ban reporting on certain issues.1 Nevertheless, despite being a controversial news genre in China, entertainment news is still playing an active role in Chinese peopleâs daily life.
1.2 Online news writing in China
Since 1997, major news media in China have been providing news services online. Among various types of online news, entertainment news is very popular in contemporary China. According to the Survey Report on the Utilization and Influence of the Internet in Five Urban Cities in China in 2005,2 entertainment news was identified as the most frequently read online news (65.5 per cent), followed by domestic news (55.0 per cent) and society news (48.4 per cent).
For the purpose of this research, relevant data have been collected from online entertainment news. The immediate question that you may ask is: why online news â is online news writing different from print news writing?
There are three reasons why I chose to collect data from online news. Firstly, news published online is much easier to collect, store and process than print media news. Secondly, and more importantly, since its emergence in the late 20th century the importance of the Internet and online news reading has been growing rapidly in China. According to the 30th Statistic Survey Report on the Internet Development in China (CNNIC 2012),3 the number of Internet users4 in China has reached 538 million, surpassing the United States as the worldâs biggest Internet market. The report also states that by June 2012 the utilisation rate of online news services had risen to 73.0 per cent, the number of online news users had jumped to 392 million and online news had become the fourth major function of the Internet, following instant messaging, search engine and online music.
The final reason for focusing on online news is that the introduction of the Internet as the fourth medium of information has brought about a dramatic change in media ecology, which has in turn impacted on news production and consumption. The prevalence of mobile phones and other devices also accelerates such a change. Therefore, online news writing has unique features that distinguish it from print news writing.
As Figure 1.1 shows, news writing, production and communication on traditional broadcast and print media platforms is largely one-way, that is, from the individual producer to a general audience with little opportunity for audience participation apart from letters to the editor and talk-back radio. The Internet, however, enables interactive communication on a massive scale. It gives its audience opportunities to interact with news producers and with each other. For example, it offers chat rooms and online messaging communication services (e.g. QQ, WeChat) where participants exchange ideas and written opinions in real time as immediate communication. It also allows readers who have online access to make follow-up comments on news reports. This provides an opportunity for news media producers to observe audience feedback and reactions, allowing them to tailor ensuing media products to meet the interests and needs of the audience. More significantly, weblogs and Weibo posts written by individuals have gradually become an important source of news. Furthermore, texts on the Internet are subject to modification or copying, and then may migrate from one site to another. In other words, the Internet, by changing the way information is shared, has expanded the accessibility of information.
Figure 1.1 The changing media ecology of news communication
In addition, in line with the popularity of the Internet, Chinese online language has undergone dramatic changes. Increasing numbers of new terms are created and rapidly become conventionalised. Such is the strength of their influence that they have come to constitute part of the contemporary Chinese linguistic repertoire. Some of the methods for creating new words are so appealing that they have been widely adopted by Chinese users. For instance, homophones are adopted to replace censored words (e.g.
[yĂčmÄ, corn] for fans of Li Yuchun). Some of these novel terms are adopted by news writers to increase the appeal of their writing to general audiences.
Also, research shows that online news reading behaviour is different from that of traditional print news reading: online news readers donât read details but scan pages quickly, looking for interesting information (Whitaker et al. 2012: 283â284). Therefore, online news writers have to adopt certain writing techniques in order to grab readersâ attention; for instance, use short and concise headlines written in simple, interesting and compelling words.
Given the above, the changing news media ecology has great potential to affect online news writing and the ways in which language is used.
1.3 Metaphor in online entertainment news
What, then, are the underlying conditions that have allowed online entertainment news to become so popular in China? How does the news manage to attract the attention of so many readers? One possible answer is that many people (in virtually an...
Table of contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Conventions
1. Introduction
2. Entertainment News Genre in China
3. Researching Metaphor in Chinese
4. Metaphor Analysis and News Corpora
5. Metaphor and Onlookersâ Entertainment
6. Metaphor and Creative and Playful Entertainment
7. Metaphor in Chinese âEntertainmentalisedâ News
