The 2013 Media Development Forum and release of the Blue Book of China’s Media (2013) was held on April 28th, at Tsinghua University. The theme for this year’s forum was “Media Development in the Era of Big Media”. Hosted by the Tsinghua University School of Journalism and Communication, the forum is a high-level conference for participants and an opportunity for dialogue between famous scholars and key leaders in the media industry.

Xie Weihe, Vice President of Tsinghua University, and Liu Binjie, Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University, both attended the forum and delivered speeches.

Led by the Center for Media Operations and Management at Tsinghua University, the blue book, which is titled Report on Development of China’s Media, is compiled by a group of leading academic experts and scholars, from both overseas and within China. The book has been published for nine consecutive years by the Social Sciences Academic Press (China) and is one of their blue book series. Since its publication, the Blue Book of China’s Media has been frequently quoted by both domestic and foreign media and has gained broad attention.

The 2013 Blue Book of China’s Media delivers a new framework of analysis, dealing with the media industry in terms of the ‘big media era’. Content-producing traditional media is compared together with the Communication Industry and the IT Industry, in order to show their correlation and variations. The book argues that today’s media industry consists of three major parts: namely, traditional media, internet media, and mobile media. New media forms evolve through the mixing of these parts.

According to Professor Cui Baoguo, Chief Editor and Vice Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University, the book was certified in 2012 by the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) and has become an authoritative book for research on China’s media industry. “This year we changed the core concept of the name of the book from ‘Media Industry’ to simply ‘Media’, in order to show the wide, international vision and authority of our research,” said Professor Cui.

(By Ma Yunfei from School of Journalism and Communication)