About Zhoushan Daily

Zhoushan Daily

Zhoushan Daily (舟山日报, Zhoushan Ribao) is the Chinese-language daily newspaper of Zhoushan, a prefecture-level city in Zhejiang province, China, made up entirely of islands in the Zhoushan Archipelago at the mouth of Hangzhou Bay. It is the official newspaper — the party paper — of the Zhoushan Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and the senior title of the city's official media. Local media histories date the Zhoushan Daily Press to 1949, the founding year of the People's Republic; the press grew into a newspaper group publishing the Daily, an evening paper and a stable of other titles, and was upgraded in 2017 into the Zhoushan Converged Media Center, headquartered on Huancheng South Road in the Dinghai district. The paper's beat is unique among Chinese city dailies: an archipelago of fishing grounds, ports, shipyards and pilgrimage islands, and since 2011 the site of China's first national new area devoted to the marine economy.

The newspaper of an island city

Zhoushan is China's only prefecture-level city built wholly on an archipelago, and its party newspaper is correspondingly unlike any mainland city daily. The municipality administers the island districts of Dinghai and Putuo and the island counties of Daishan and Shengsi, a sea territory of fishing ports, ferry routes and naval and merchant anchorages in the East China Sea. Distribution of a printed daily across islands, and reporting gathered from island communities, have always shaped the paper's operations. The Zhoushan Daily Press is dated by local media accounts to 1949; through the following decades the paper served as the municipal committee's organ for the islands, the printed channel through which islanders received the policies of the state and news of their own scattered communities.

A newspaper group on the eve of convergence

The fullest published portrait of the paper's house comes from the Zhoushan Daily Press development report for 2012–2013, published in the Zhejiang provincial press development report series. By that time the group published, alongside Zhoushan Daily itself, the Zhoushan Evening News, the Zhoushan Xiangyin paper, the Zhoushan Net website, the Wangchao weekly, and the Zhoushang magazine, together with mobile terminals and official microblog and WeChat presences — described in the report as a basically complete media landscape. In the two years covered by the report, the group's works won a record haul of prizes in the Zhejiang News Awards, including first prizes; eleven of its columns were rated municipal brand columns; and its website was named among Zhejiang's ten best cultural-communication innovation websites. The group employed its own editorial staff together with more than two hundred employees in its subsidiary companies, with close to a hundred staff holding middle or senior professional titles.

Reporting the New Area: the "New Area Sets Sail" campaign

The defining news story of the paper's recent decades is the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area. Approved by the State Council in 2011 as China's first national-level new area themed on the marine economy, the New Area made the island city an experimental zone for port logistics, marine industry and opening to the sea — and made its party paper the chronicler of a national project. The group's 2012–2013 report describes how its three main media — the Daily, the Evening News and Zhoushan Net — jointly organised coverage under the banner "New Area Sets Sail": the Daily carried a major thematic report on its front page, with sections titled "Spring Tide" and "Melody" and more than one hundred and forty reports accompanied by commentaries; the Evening News answered with a grassroots edition of the same campaign, telling the story through the thoughts of ordinary workers in every trade; and Zhoushan Net produced multimedia specials reflecting the New Area's construction in full. The campaign is a textbook example of the Chinese party press's mobilisation reporting, executed here by an island newspaper group across all its platforms.

From press group to converged media center

In 2017, following the national policy of media convergence, the Zhoushan Daily Press was transformed and upgraded into the Zhoushan Converged Media Center, the single institution through which the island city's official news is now gathered and published. The centre is headquartered at 188 Huancheng South Road in Dinghai, the historic administrative seat of the archipelago on Zhoushan Island itself. Local accounts describe the centre as the most influential news institution in the Zhoushan region and the hub of its news communication. Within the converged structure Zhoushan Daily continues in print as the centre's flagship newspaper and the municipal committee's organ, its reporting flowing simultaneously to the centre's website, mobile and social channels. The paper's Journalists' Day coverage in November 2022, profiling veteran reporters who had spent careers recording the islands' development — among them a senior reporter who joined the paper in 1992 and became the city's only top-grade accredited journalist — showed the institution consciously tending its own newsroom tradition within the new structure.

Coverage: fisheries and the sea economy

The sea is the paper's home beat. The Zhoushan fishing grounds off the archipelago are among China's most famous and productive, and the city's identity was built on fishing: the fleets of Shenjiamen, one of China's great fishing ports, the seafood trade, and the seasonal rhythms of the moratorium and the opening of the fishing season are permanent fixtures of the Daily's pages. In the New Area era that traditional coverage has widened to the whole marine economy — port throughput and shipping services, shipbuilding and repair, marine tourism, and the Zhejiang Pilot Free Trade Zone, whose Zhoushan sections specialise in the oil and gas supply chain, from storage and refining on the outer islands to bonded bunkering for international shipping. The paper reports these industries both as business news and as the municipal committee's development programme, in which the Daily is the official explainer.

Coverage: Mount Putuo and island tourism

Zhoushan's other great presence is religious and touristic. Mount Putuo, an island in the Putuo district, is one of the four sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism, dedicated to Guanyin, and draws pilgrims and visitors from across China and the Chinese-speaking world; the Zhoushan Daily covers its festivals, its temple community and the logistics of an island economy built on pilgrimage. Around it the archipelago markets itself on island scenery, seafood and summer tourism, from the beaches of Zhujiajian to the remote island villages of Shengsi. The paper's culture and tourism coverage — successors to the group's weekly and magazine titles devoted to island life and local commerce — presents this island world to its own residents and to the mainland audience the city's promoters hope to attract across the sea-crossing bridges that now link Zhoushan Island to Ningbo and the Yangtze Delta.

Coverage: island communities and public services

As a municipal party paper, Zhoushan Daily's daily bread is the governance of an island prefecture: fisheries administration and maritime safety, typhoon and storm-surge warnings for a city squarely in the typhoon belt, ferry and bridge transport, water and power supply to outlying islands, and the schools, clinics and pensions of small island communities. The group's own reporting philosophy, visible in the grassroots edition of its New Area campaign, emphasises telling policy through the experience of fishermen, workers and island households. Its brand columns and award-winning reporting, recognised in the provincial news awards recorded in the group's development report, have been built substantially on this island subject matter, which no other Zhejiang newspaper covers as its home ground.

Place in the Zhejiang party press

Zhoushan Daily is the smallest-city party daily in this Zhejiang set by land population, but the most distinctive in territory: the only Chinese party newspaper whose prefecture is entirely maritime. Its documented passage from a 1949-founded island press, through a diversified newspaper group whose 2012–2013 development was reported in the provincial press yearbooks, to a converged media centre in 2017, mirrors the national story of the Chinese local press in miniature. It remains what it has been since the founding of the People's Republic: the Zhoushan municipal committee's daily voice to the islands, and the printed record of the archipelago city's reinvention as a marine-economy new area.