The New York Times is making a business move towards China, opening a Chinese language news website and a Sina Weibo account.Unlike its American version, the Chinese edition of the New York Times will have no paywall. Eileen M. Murphy, vice president of corporate communications for the New York Times, told Mashable that offering an unpaid site, at least in the beginning, is “consistent with what we do when we start new ventures.”
“We want this new site to be found,” she said, while adding that there are no current plans to put up a paywall in the future.New York Times’ Chinese site will launch in beta on Thursday morning local time. Its URL will be http://cn.nytimes.com/ “The goal of the new site is to provide China’s growing number of educated, affluent, global citizens with high-quality coverage of world affairs, business and culture,” said the New York Times in a statement. “The site will be edited specifically for readers in China, presenting translations of the best of The Times’s award-winning journalism alongside original work by Chinese writers contributing to The Times.”
The site will cover global affairs, business and culture with about 30 articles per day, all in Chinese. About two-thirds of the content will be translated pieces and one-third will be content from local reporters, although that model could change over time. It will be advertising supported, with luxury brands including Ferragamo, Bloomingdales and Cartier signed up to appeal to the Chinese New York Times‘ audience.Content will be hosted on servers located outside of China, which Murphy pointed out is how other non-Chinese news website also operate. Using foreign servers gives websites the ability to work around local laws in the censorship-heavy country.
“The Times will dictate the content on the site,” said Murphy. “We’ve made no deal with the Chinese government, we’re aware that there’s that kind of history and they may block stories or sites,” adding they hope that’s something they won’t have to contend with.China’s access to information on the Internet is tightly controlled by its government. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are not allowed in the country due to the “Great Firewall of China.” But that doesn’t mean citizens don’t want to access this information. When the country’s firewall crashed in 2011 for less than two days, citizens logged on to Google+ to complain that their government “doesn’t represent the Chinese people.”
Typically, people in countries with restrictive access to the Internet use VPNs, Virtual Private Networks, to access blocked sites while keeping the user undetected. Chinese Internet users using VPNs can tunnel under the national firewall and use banned sites as if they were in another country that allows those sites. Traffic is encrypted so the Chinese government’s censors cannot see what content users are viewing.Last year, Internet users in China reported poor connectivity while visiting sites such as Google while using a VPN, the Guardian reported. It was suspected that the Chinese government was involved. Do you think the Chinese government will attempt to stop citizens from accessing the New York Times’ new site? Tell us in the comments.
“We want this new site to be found,” she said, while adding that there are no current plans to put up a paywall in the future.New York Times’ Chinese site will launch in beta on Thursday morning local time. Its URL will be http://cn.nytimes.com/ “The goal of the new site is to provide China’s growing number of educated, affluent, global citizens with high-quality coverage of world affairs, business and culture,” said the New York Times in a statement. “The site will be edited specifically for readers in China, presenting translations of the best of The Times’s award-winning journalism alongside original work by Chinese writers contributing to The Times.”The site will cover global affairs, business and culture with about 30 articles per day, all in Chinese. About two-thirds of the content will be translated pieces and one-third will be content from local reporters, although that model could change over time. It will be advertising supported, with luxury brands including Ferragamo, Bloomingdales and Cartier signed up to appeal to the Chinese New York Times‘ audience.Content will be hosted on servers located outside of China, which Murphy pointed out is how other non-Chinese news website also operate. Using foreign servers gives websites the ability to work around local laws in the censorship-heavy country.
“The Times will dictate the content on the site,” said Murphy. “We’ve made no deal with the Chinese government, we’re aware that there’s that kind of history and they may block stories or sites,” adding they hope that’s something they won’t have to contend with.China’s access to information on the Internet is tightly controlled by its government. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are not allowed in the country due to the “Great Firewall of China.” But that doesn’t mean citizens don’t want to access this information. When the country’s firewall crashed in 2011 for less than two days, citizens logged on to Google+ to complain that their government “doesn’t represent the Chinese people.”
Typically, people in countries with restrictive access to the Internet use VPNs, Virtual Private Networks, to access blocked sites while keeping the user undetected. Chinese Internet users using VPNs can tunnel under the national firewall and use banned sites as if they were in another country that allows those sites. Traffic is encrypted so the Chinese government’s censors cannot see what content users are viewing.Last year, Internet users in China reported poor connectivity while visiting sites such as Google while using a VPN, the Guardian reported. It was suspected that the Chinese government was involved. Do you think the Chinese government will attempt to stop citizens from accessing the New York Times’ new site? Tell us in the comments.
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