Postscript: News and the Chinese public

Marx once remarked that news was "a vocal tie ... to link a person with his nation and the whole world ..." (see the Complete Works of Marx and Engles, V. 26). Thus regardless of race, nation, or color of skin, people have an inherent need to interact with the outside world. People need to know what goes on within and without so as to be well-attuned to their surroundings. In this sense, all have a common frame for assessing news, the most basic of which is' the currency of information of all happenings. What the public require of news is freshness, importance, authenticity, approximateness, practicality and objectivity. However, the audiences' concept of news value is not inborn, but acquired from cultural norms and practices. Our concept of news is rooted deeply in our society. Where there are different transmission systems, there are different transmission milieu and different transmission contexts, giving rise to different concepts of news value.