The head of China’s top print media regulating agency said yesterday that newly emerging media platforms like Weblogs have “already drawn attention from relevant government offices” and stressed they would soon be brought under their supervision with the help of new management regulations on Internet publishing, according to the Beijing Morning Post [Chinese here]. It was not immediately clear what changes would be made to control the growing tide of user-generated content on China’s Web. [BELOW: Screenshot of today’s newspage at Sohu.com with coverage of GAPP announcement].
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Long Xinmin (龙新民), head of the General Administration of Press and Publications, said his agency planned to work with other departments to formulate a “Management Regulations on Internet Publishing”.
“With protecting the speech rights of citizens as the precondition, we will safeguard a healthy and vital Internet publishing environment,” Long was quoted by the Beijing Morning Post as saying. “We must face the fact that in an era when the Web is developing at a rapid pace, government supervision measures and methods face new challenges”.
MORE SOURCES:
Long Xinmin announces ban on issuing of shares by Chinese newspapers groups, FT, December 2006
“Microsoft censors Chinese blogs“, BBC.com, June 14, 2005
“The ‘blog’ revolution sweeps across China“, New Scientist, November 24, 2004
A list of favorite Chinese-language blogs from Danwei.org
[Posted by David Bandurski, March 13, 2007, 11:59am]