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. Many academics see journalists who learn the craft on the job, rather than going through rigorous training in ideology, as responsible for the gutter press, which poses a potential threat to society and the state. The five-day course, though brief, is designed to remedy the situation. Since the government launched media reforms this summer to weed out weak and redundant publications, many journalists fear for their jobs. One said that journalists need practical guidance more than talks about serving as the 'throat and tongue' of the Communist Party. But the dual aims of serving the party and operating a lively press are not as irreconcilable as they may seem. The Southern Daily Group, which includes the namesake party paper, the highly acclaimed Southern Weekend and the dynamic Southern Metro News, has succeeded in satisfying both demands. The Southern Daily recently published an interview with an academic, who said that a good journalist must be versed in the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, the thoughts of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping's theories and, last but not least, the theory of the Three Representatives. He said the job of a journalist is to transmit the policy and direction adopted by the Communist Party and cheerlead the progress of building a well-off society. At the same time, the tabloid Southern Metro News had a different idea of the type of journalists it wanted to hire. Its recruitment advertisement says: 'Attention, ambitious young people. If you love news, have a strong sense of responsibility, integrity, honesty, some reporting and editing experience and a college degree. Age 35 or under, give yourself a chance.' Nailene Chou Wiest is a Post correspondent based in Beijing
