The Beijing Bureau of Al Jazeera English has been forced to shut down, because Chinese authorities have revoked the visa of Melissa Chan, its Chinese correspondent, and refused to allow any replacement. more ›

Zhao Pu, an anchor at the state-owned China Central Television (CCTV) is said to have been booted from his routine program after advising people on his Weibo not to eat solid yogurt due to contamination scares. more ›

More than half of the 27 journalists imprisoned in China are ethnic Tibetan or Uyghur, says the Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) in a report posted on its website. more ›

After featuring the political calligraphy of Bo Xilai prominently on its front page for two consecutive days on Feb 8 and Feb 9, Chongqing Daily appears to have done an about-face in its treatment of the municipal Communist Party chief. Today, it was Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan that occupied much of the paper's front page. more ›

State broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) has officially launched CCTV America in its bid to capture a greater share of the global audience. The new operation, located out of a brand new studio in Washington DC, will be produced by about 100 journalists in 15 bureaus in North and South America, offering viewers four hours of programming daily in three programmes: Biz Asia America, a business news broadcast; The Heat, a talkshow; and Americas Now, a news magazine programme. more ›

A few links to start off your day: This week Business Week looks at the somewhat shady practice of Christian private schools luring over wealthy Chinese exchange students in order to proselytize and convert them. In a Foreign Policy piece entitled "The End of the Chinese Dream", Christina Larson examines the palpable sense of frustration among city dwellers, and asks the question: "Could it possibly be true that a swath of people in China's big cities is downwardly mobile?" more ›

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Hell hath no fury like a CCTV reporter scorned. We told you previously about the 35 security guards who attacked three young men outside a KTV in Kunming, leaving one dead and two hospitalised, only to realise later that they had beaten up the wrong guys. To clear things up, the Kunming Public Security Bureau and Dabanqiao Neighbourhood Committee Office held a press conference which lasted all of five minutes yesterday. And what a catastrophe it was. more ›

Over at Asia Society, former Shanghaiist editor Dan Washburn has an excellent interview with Mike Chinoy, who served as CNN's Beijing bureau chief from 1987 to 1995 and is currently a Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. In the interview, Chinoy looks back at the challenges that he and other China correspondents faced in getting their work done, and how that contrasts with the situation today. more ›

Exporting China's Development to the World, a weblog with a mouthful of a title run by a group of anthropologists from Macquarie University (Sydney) and Free University (Amsterdam), tells us of how China is expanding its efforts in controlling influencing Chinese-language media outside of China. more ›

Evan Osnos, the New Yorker's impeccably-coiffed Beijing-based China correspondent, is in town for another chatty discussion with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, history professor at the University of California Irvine, and author of the China-primer China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know. more ›

"Designed for press photographers by press photographers", The Press Photographer's Year is a competition among UK news media that recognizes and showcases press photography. This year, two winners for digital film and multimedia are China-based press photographers Sean Gallagher and Dan Chung, with reporting by Tania Branigan. Adam Dean, now a Beijing-based photographer, also won first prize for his photo essay covering troops in Afghanistan last year (see those here.) Definitely take a minute (if you have a VPN) to watch the very beautifully crafted videos below. more ›

Zhang Zhi'an, professor with Fudan University's school of journalism, and Dr Shen Fei of Hong Kong City University's department of media and communication, compiled the first report covering mainland investigative reporters. In this they found that most of them are planning to quit in the near future, as they suffer from "burnout over intimidation". more ›

Watch what happens when ABC (the Aussie one) foreign correspondent Stephen McDonell decides to confront the handful of thuggish Chinese men who'd been following him around for days. Result: total insanity. more ›

The latest media release from the Committee to Protect Journalists reads:

The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the dismissal of two Guangzhou-based journalists who advocate for political reform amid tightening restrictions on free expression. While several bloggers and activists have disappeared or been detained in the last month after anonymous calls for demonstrations in support of political reform were published online, journalists in traditional media are now also being targeted, CPJ said. more ›

Global Times, the flag bearer of timely, accurate journalism, has published an opinion piece cum journalism lesson, entitled "Accuracy should come before politics in reporting on China" which had us doing a double-take just to make sho' it wasn't written by our good friend Hao Leifeng. more ›

When sent to cover possibly the driest, most pre-scripted nightmare of a political session in the world, what role does the Chinese reporter play? Coverage on the sessions is pre-drafted for mass consumption already, and unless they're looking to capture flashy minority outfits or an assemblage of hard-faced old men, there's not much else to see. So instead, young, ambitious journalists descend on the sessions in a mass of frenzied star-chasing (追星, Zhuīxīng). CPPCC members attract the lion's share of attention, as the larger legislative body pulls people from every industry including entertainment, sports, and music. Above you'll find a taste of the stars of the show this year so far (captions translated from Netease, for the most part.) more ›

China is the closest thing that North Korea has to a friend at the moment and we get that the People's Daily is the CCP's official mouthpiece, but they were just asking for it when reporter Zhou Ziran posted up this gushy article on the wonderful state of things in Pyongyang. Let's just say that commenters had a field day with the fluffy piece. more ›

"Right now journalists are a major public nuisance in our country... If these journalists were all lined up and shot, I would feel heartache for not a single one of them. more ›