About Weifang News Net

Weifang News Net

Weifang News Net, published at wfnews.com.cn, is the digital news portal of the Weifang Daily Media Group in Weifang, Shandong province, China. It publishes Weifang municipal news and the group's newspaper editions online, serving as the city's official online news gateway in central Shandong. Distinct from Shandong's provincial news websites, which are based in the capital Jinan, Weifang News Net is the web presence of Weifang's own newspaper group and the first port of call for news about the city itself.

The portal serves a prefecture-level city of considerable size and strong local identity. Weifang administers a large territory in the middle of the Shandong peninsula, between Jinan to the west and Qingdao to the east, and it is known across China and abroad as the world capital of kites. Weifang News Net covers that city's government, economy, culture and daily life, and publishes the group's editions in digital form for readers who no longer take the printed paper.

Identity and ownership

Weifang News Net is operated under the Weifang Daily Media Group, the newspaper organisation built around Weifang Daily, the city's flagship newspaper. The site's status is recorded in the licensed news-website lists administered under the Cyberspace Administration of China for Shandong municipal news websites, which identify it as Weifang's city-level news portal. Its domain, wfnews.com.cn, follows the pattern used by many Chinese municipal news sites, combining the city's initials with the word news.

Because the portal belongs to the city's newspaper group, its journalism comes from the group's own newsrooms rather than from aggregation. That ownership matters for readers: the site speaks with the institutional authority of Weifang's established press, and its reports are the group's reports, published online alongside its print editions.

The city it serves

Weifang is a prefecture-level city in the centre of the Shandong peninsula. City profiles record a total area of about 15,859 square kilometres — roughly a tenth of Shandong province — and a location between the provincial capital Jinan and the coastal city of Qingdao, neighbouring Zibo, Yantai, Rizhao and Linyi. Historically known as Weixian, the city has been an important hub on the old road east from Jinan since the Qin dynasty era, and in the Ming and Qing dynasties it was a prosperous commercial centre.

That history gives Weifang News Net a rich civic beat. The city it covers is simultaneously an industrial city, an agricultural producer on the Shandong plain, and a cultural centre whose kite-making and woodblock New Year picture traditions — both centred on Yangjiabu — were inscribed on China's first national intangible cultural heritage list in 2006. Municipal news in Weifang therefore ranges from factory and farm reporting to festival coverage and heritage protection, all of it published for a local audience by its local portal.

Weifang, the world kite capital

No account of Weifang's news agenda is complete without the kite. Weifang is renowned as the world capital of kites: the first Weifang International Kite Festival was held in 1984, in 1988 the festival's presidium formally named Weifang the kite capital of the world, and in 1989 the International Kite Federation was established with its headquarters in Weifang. Kite-making is rooted in local tradition stretching back more than two thousand years, with historical accounts attributing the prototype kite to the philosopher Mozi.

The modern kite industry is also serious business, and therefore serious news. Reporting on the festival's fortieth edition in 2023 recorded more than 600 kite enterprises in Weifang, over 80,000 people engaged in the sector, annual sales above two billion yuan, and exports to more than 50 countries and regions, with Weifang products holding a dominant share of the international kite market. For Weifang News Net, the annual festival each April is one of the biggest recurring stories on the calendar — a cultural celebration, a trade event and a piece of city branding at once.

Coverage and editorial focus

Weifang News Net publishes the full range of municipal news for its city: municipal government and policy, economic development and industry, agriculture, education, health, transport and public services, together with news from Weifang's districts and counties. As the online arm of the Weifang Daily Media Group, it also publishes the group's newspaper editions online, so readers can follow the titles they know in print through the website.

The portal's economy coverage reflects the city it serves — manufacturing, the kite industry, agriculture and trade on the Shandong peninsula — while its culture coverage draws on Weifang's heritage assets, from Yangjiabu New Year pictures to the kite festival. This combination of practical municipal reporting and strong local colour is characteristic of China's city newspaper portals, and Weifang's version is shaped by an unusually distinctive city identity.

Position among Shandong news websites

Shandong's online news system is layered by level. Provincial outlets based in Jinan speak for the province as a whole, while each prefecture-level city maintains the portal of its own newspaper group. Weifang News Net is the Weifang layer of that system: closer to its readers than any provincial site, responsible for the detailed coverage of Weifang's districts and counties that provincial media cannot sustain.

The distinction is practical as well as formal. A provincial report on Shandong's economy may mention Weifang in a paragraph; Weifang News Net reports the individual enterprises, markets and villages behind the figures, and it carries the municipal announcements — school admissions, road works, public consultations — that residents actually act on. For anyone researching Weifang specifically, the city portal is the primary source, and provincial coverage is the supplement.

Licensing and regulation

Like other Chinese newspaper-group portals, Weifang News Net operates under the Internet News Information Service licensing regime administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China. The regulations require a licence to provide internet news information services — gathering and dissemination, reprinting, or platform services — to the public, and applications from local news work units are accepted and decided by the provincial, autonomous-region or municipal internet information office, with licences valid for three years. News information under the regime covers reporting and comment on politics, economics and other social public affairs, and on sudden social incidents.

Weifang News Net's appearance in the CAC licensed lists for Shandong municipal news websites is the public evidence of that status. It confirms the site as an authorised city news outlet of the Weifang Daily Media Group, operating within the same regulatory framework as the group's print newspapers.

Readers and how the site is used

The portal's core readers are Weifang's residents, who use it for municipal announcements, service information and local reporting, and for reading the group's editions online. Businesses use it to follow the city's economic policy and its key industries; the kite trade, in particular, is covered at a level of local detail available nowhere else. Readers with Weifang roots living elsewhere in China use the site to keep up with their home city.

For outside readers — researchers, journalists and companies assessing central Shandong — Weifang News Net offers the city's own account of itself, direct from its newspaper group. In a province with several large cities competing for attention, the portal ensures that Weifang's news is published under Weifang's own name, by Weifang's own journalists.

Why Weifang News Net matters

Weifang News Net matters as the digital voice of a distinctive Chinese city. It carries the Weifang Daily Media Group's journalism online, anchors the city's presence in Shandong's licensed news-website system, and covers everything from municipal administration to the world kite festival with a local knowledge no outside outlet can match. For readers in Weifang it is a daily utility; for readers elsewhere it is the authoritative starting point for news about the kite capital and its region.