Will Olympics transform China's media landscape?

With the Beijing Olympics fast approaching, the world’s attention will soon focus on the rapidly changing but still sensitive news media landscape in China.

At a media conference last week in Bangkok, Thailand, sponsored by the East-West Center of Honolulu, several starkly different visions of that landscape emerged. Some were optimistic, some pessimistic and some predicted that the future of news and media in China will be drastically different from anything seen before.

Among those speaking to the conference of journalists and researchers was a leading Chinese media reformer, a Hong Kong newspaper baron, a pioneer of the Chinese blogging revolution and several journalists tasked with reporting on the Olympic games.

There was considerable optimism about China and press freedoms. Some suggested that internal reform in China will eventually do away with overbearing state control of the media.

Others said that new media, or the “blogosphere,” make the debate over state control or interference irrelevant as consumers find other ways to get their news and information.

Journalists headed to the Olympics said they fear China’s preoccupation with making the games an absolute success will lead to aggressive but ultimately futile attempts to control what is reported.

Among those who spoke were Chee Ying “Jimmy” Lai, the ebullient and blunt founder and chairman of Hong Kong’s Next Media, Ltd., publisher of the popular Chinese daily Apple; media reformer and editor Li Datong; and new media entrepreneur Isaac Mao, co-founder of the Social Brain Foundation of China and CNBlog, the earliest website focused on grassroots publishing in China.

Lai told the conference that the success of his publications rests on their ability to abandon old ways of storytelling and communicating. Critics say his publications are “sensational,” a charge Lai readily accepts.

Sensationalism, Lai said, means telling stories in human terms.

“Newspapers are sentimental and emotional products,” Lai said. “It’s not the news, it is the emotion behind the story that counts.”

Without that emotion, Lai argued, journalism in China or anywhere else is doomed to become irrelevant.

“Media is about life,” he said. “Life is about drama. Drama is about pain, fear, happiness – all of that. The media has to reflect that. People need media not because they need news, but because they need shared sentiment.”

In China, the biggest human drama on the horizon is the Olympics. Lai said his Hong Kong publications will indeed send reporters to the games, but as “tourists.” They cannot get media credentials because his papers have been steadfastly critical of the Chinese government’s hand in internal Hong Kong affairs, Lai said.

Two journalists who will be at the Olympics with credentials are Francesco Liello, China correspondent for La Gazetta dello Sport of Italy and the first reporter credentialed for the games, and Gary Swanson, a journalist-in-residence at the University of Northern Colorado and a consultant to NBC News, which will cover the games.

They are concerned.

Liello, who has already been arrested once for attempting to do a story on alleged doping of young Chinese athletes, worries that overzealous authorities might ruin what otherwise promises to be a spectacular event.

Such over-sensitivity can become self-defeating, Liello said.

“There is always criticism of the Olympics,” he said. “In Atlanta, it was the influence of Coca-Cola and other commercial interests. In Athens, it was that the venues were not ready.

“But China is not acceptin