About Dezhou Television

Dezhou Television

Overview

Dezhou Television (Chinese: 德州电视台) is the television service of Dezhou, a prefecture-level city in northwestern Shandong province, on the North China Plain where Shandong meets Hebei. It operates as part of Dezhou Radio and Television Station, the municipal broadcaster formed in 2011, whose official website is dztv.tv and which serves as the voice of the Dezhou municipal party committee and government.

The station runs two television channels — a News Channel and a Public Channel — alongside three radio frequencies, broadcasting in Mandarin across a canal-side agricultural prefecture famous nationwide for braised chicken, for solar energy, and for the acrobats of Ningjin.

Roots: radio in 1981, television in 1987

Dezhou Television was founded on 1 December 1987. Its radio sibling is older: Dezhou People's Radio dates from 24 June 1981. The two services grew up separately through the 1980s and 1990s, television arriving in Dezhou in the same wave that brought prefecture stations to most Chinese cities, and radio already established as the prefecture's daily voice.

A third element joined them in the internet era: Dalüe Web, the municipal news portal. The three were the ingredients from which the modern broadcaster was assembled.

The integrated station of 2011

In 2011 the former Dezhou Television, Dezhou People's Radio and Dalüe Web were integrated to form Dezhou Radio and Television Station. The merger created a single municipal media house responsible for the prefecture's broadcast news, its radio frequencies and its online news presence — the standard converged structure adopted by Chinese prefecture media in that period.

The station's published departmental documents describe its remit in terms typical of a municipal broadcaster with unusual explicitness: to publicise policy and maintain correct orientation, to plan and implement its own development strategy and push forward deep media convergence, to gather, edit, produce, review and broadcast news and features for radio, television and online audio-visual platforms, and to cooperate with central, provincial and other broadcasters in presenting Dezhou to the outside world.

Television channels

Dezhou's television offer comprises two channels. The News Channel — styled in the station's internal organisation as the Television News Comprehensive Channel — is the flagship, carrying Dezhou's news bulletins, current affairs and features. The Public Channel is the second service, the policy-oriented channel that Chinese prefecture broadcasters maintain alongside their flagships.

Both channels are produced within a station whose internal departments, as listed in its published budget documents, include the two television channels themselves, a Film and Television Centre, and the converged-media units described below — a compact structure in which channel, production centre and digital operation sit side by side.

The radio frequencies

Alongside television, the station operates three radio frequencies. News Comprehensive Radio broadcasts on AM 1098 and FM 104.1. Arts and Life Radio broadcasts on AM 1008 and FM 92.9. Traffic Music Radio, serving the prefecture's drivers, broadcasts on AM 1341 and FM 94.1.

The dual AM/FM carriage of each service reflects the prefecture's geography: a flat, rural territory of counties spread across the plain, where medium-wave reach and FM quality together cover market towns and county seats alike.

Inside the station: departments and transmission

Dezhou Radio and Television Station's published structure lists sixteen functional departments, among them an editorial office, a public-opinion supervision department, a converged media centre and a converged-media operations department, the radio and television channels, the film and television centre, and the broadcast transmission station. It also administers one subordinate public institution: the Dezhou Microwave Head Station, the management body for the city's microwave transmission network.

That network is the invisible backbone of prefecture broadcasting: the microwave station manages the relay of broadcast news and feature material from province to city and from city to the counties below. City government statistics give the scale of the system the station works within — eleven television transmission and relay stations in the prefecture with a combined transmitter power of 55.8 kilowatts, four television programmes broadcast for a total of 20,399 hours in the year, 1.1495 million cable radio and television users, and radio and television population coverage of 100 percent.

Convergence: command hall, platform and HD studio

Dezhou's investment in converged media is a matter of public record. City leaders touring the station have visited the Command Hall and the News Editing and Production Department of its Media Convergence Center, where the collection, editing and distribution of news across platforms is coordinated, and have joined video links with county-level convergence operations such as Pingyuan County's. On another visit, officials attended the launch of the station's converged-media platform and inspected its newly completed high-definition panoramic studio.

Prefecture broadcasting's public-service reach is documented in the city's own reporting: in the poverty-alleviation drive conducted through radio and television, all 32,896 eligible poor households in Dezhou were connected to listen and watch free of charge, and the city's press, publication, radio, film and television administration was named a National Advanced Collective of the national system — described by the city as the first time Dezhou had won the system's highest honour, and the only municipal-level department in the province to do so. The city's radio and television work, the same account records, ranks among the nationally advanced.

The station's studio has also served as a civic stage: the award ceremony honouring Dezhou's inspirational role models and most influential events of the forty years of reform and opening up was held in the Dezhou Radio and Television studio, in an event co-organised with the station among the city's leading publicity institutions.

The city on screen: canal, chicken and solar power

Dezhou stands on the Grand Canal and the Yellow River plain, bordering Hebei, and its television reflects an agricultural prefecture's calendar: wheat and corn harvests, county industries, river and canal heritage. The prefecture's cultural signatures include Ningjin acrobatics and a canal-side history, and in Yucheng the city has launched a Yu the Great Cultural Festival alongside Shandong's Farmers' Harvest Festival celebrations — the kind of folk-culture programming that fills a prefecture station's features slots.

Two Dezhou products are national brands. Dezhou braised chicken is famous across China, its name inseparable from railway-era travel food culture. And the city styles itself China's solar city for its solar-energy industry — a manufacturing identity the station's economic coverage follows closely, alongside the food brands and farm economy of the plain.

Programming character

The character of Dezhou Television is set by its structure: a news flagship that carries the municipal agenda, a public channel, a film and television centre supplying drama and features, a dedicated public-opinion supervision department feeding accountability journalism, and converged-media units repackaging the same journalism for web and mobile audiences. External publicity is an explicit part of the remit — the station is charged with cooperating with central and provincial media to tell Dezhou's story beyond the prefecture.

Its audiences are those of the northwest Shandong plain: county towns, farming villages and a prefecture city, served in Mandarin with a mix of bulletins, livelihood information and cultural programming rooted in canal and plain life.

Why Dezhou Television matters

Dezhou Television matters as a well-documented example of the Chinese prefecture broadcaster in its converged era. Its founding dates are precise — radio in 1981, television in 1987, integration in 2011 — its channels and frequencies are matters of public record, and its internal machinery, from the microwave head station to the HD panoramic studio, is described in its own published documents.

For the households of Dezhou, it is simply the city's screen: the News Channel's bulletins, the Public Channel's services, and the converged platforms that carry Dezhou's canal heritage, farm economy and solar ambitions to the prefecture and beyond.