Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

In the early part of this year, there were rumblings from CCTV about possible retoolings to its Network News broadcast (新闻联播), the formulaic half-hour of reporting on the activities of national leaders and positively-spun national events that takes over televisions nationwide every evening at 7:00.

Changes have been rumored to be in store for Network News for years now. New anchors were finally added in late 2007, but the broadcast itself changed little. This year's format and content changes were intended to bring the program "closer to the people," perhaps through something similar to the "cold news," "hot news," and "in my words" segments rumored to make up Hunan TV's competitor to the CCTV broadcast.

But is eliminating reports on the activities of China's national leadership really the best way to improve the program? In a column for China Newsweek, journalist Chang Ping argues that paradoxically, CCTV Network News without ten minutes of leaders' daily activities is even further from quality journalism than its old formula was.

Network News has had a redesign. I've watched a few days of it and find it pretty strange. A CCTV spokesperson did not admit to the redesign, but called it instead "an experiment in editing and broadcast formats." Perhaps there's some truth to this, because the changes to the news broadcast on the program haven't been that big. The biggest change is that reporting on meetings and the activities of leaders has practically disappeared.

In one respect, CCTV is answering the people by eliminating those two types of news, because for decades those seemed uninspired even compared to the other segments on the program: a boring format empty of content. Like the mocking ditty goes, "There's no meeting that's not solemn, no closing ceremony that's not a success, no speech that's not important, no applause that's not enthusiastic, no leaders that aren't attentive, no visit that's not genial..."

And that's basically the style of Network News and its "three segments": the first ten minutes talk about how busy the leaders are, the middle ten about how happy people are across the country, and the final ten about how chaotic other places in the world are. It can't have been easy to carry on like that through this era of dramatic changes.