Before the end of the year, many of the 600,000 journalists in China will take a qualifying exam to get their new national press ID card. An electronic database will list their names and affiliations to make it easy to check. The plan, the General Administration of Press and Publication hopes, will clean up the ranks, introduce transparency and make journalists subject to public supervision.
To prepare for the exam, journalists must take a special course to review media ethics and brush up their reporting skills. The five-day, 49-hour course costs 350 yuan (HK$329), which is generally paid by the employer.
Officials and journalism-school teachers hail this course-and-exam package as a much-needed measure to raise the threshold of entering the profession. But journalists consider it a waste of time and say the system discriminates against freelancers.
Over the past decade of economic reforms, the media landscape has changed to become more diverse and more competitive. As the press becomes more commercially driven, the newspapers have come to rely heavily on the so-called 'temporary workers' as a source of flexible and inexpensive labour. Many of the temporary workers have been reporting side by side with staff journalists for years, but they do not have press credentials.
'Can we say that these temporary workers are not journalists because their names are not in the electronic database?' asked one editor.
He said he stood by his regular staff, reporters and temporary workers alike, judging them on their journalistic skills and integrity. He was not bothered by whether they carried a press card or had attended journalism schools.
Currently, about 30,000 to 40,000 journalists, or 5 to 7 per cent of the national total, have a diploma in journalism.