COMMUNICATIONS AND THE MEDIA
298
Departmental Units Division
The number of information and public relations units in government departments and branches has grown steadily over the years to its present level of 30, excluding three attached to overseas offices. There are more than 230 information officers in these units, dealing with information, public relations and publicity aspects of the work of departments or branches concerned.
A separate Departmental Units Division to handle responsibilities which had previously come under the Public Relations Division was established in 1990 on a one-year trial basis to provide guidance, advice and direction to heads of departmental units on the formula- tion and development of public relations strategies. The new division also anticipates, monitors and co-ordinates issues with public relations implications spread over various departments to ensure consistency of purpose.
Publicity Division
The Publicity Division embraces the creative, publishing and promotional resources of the department. Its ambit includes photography and film-making, an extensive photographic library, staging exhibitions, designing books, leaflets and posters and the design and placement of all government advertising. GIS produces a wide variety of publications ranging from leaflets and fact sheets to the Hong Kong Annual Report and other full-colour books. Sales of government publications totalled more than $33.4 million in 1990, com- pared with $31.1 million in 1989. The main emphasis of publishing activity continued to lie with information material for free distribution. During the year some 509 items totalling over 8.1 million copies were given out to the public. These included leaflets advising on procedures for obtaining a wide range of government services, together with fact sheets covering 61 topics, which are updated annually with the latest statistics.
The Publicity Division also organises and implements all government campaigns and publicity programmes. It educates the public on major issues of concern and creates public awareness of civic responsibilities through posters, films, exhibitions and other promotional material. During the year, 13 major government campaigns were run by the Promotions Office of the division. These included Environmental Protection, Road Safety, Population Census, Anti-Narcotics, AIDS, Fight Crime, Rehabilitation of the Disabled, Industrial Safety, Identity Card Re-Issue, Civic Education and Fire Prevention. A large-scale publicity programme was mounted to boost voter registration for the elections in 1991 and, for the first time, a campaign was launched to encourage home owners to form corporations to improve the management of private buildings.
The Press
Hong Kong's flourishing free press consists of 69 newspapers and 610 periodicals, which have a high readership. The registered newspapers include 39 Chinese-language dailies and two English-language dailies. A number of news agency bulletins - Chinese, English and Japanese - are also registered as newspapers.
Of the Chinese-language dailies, 33 cover mainly general news, both local and overseas, while others cover solely entertainment, especially television and cinema news, and two concentrate on finance. The larger papers include Chinese communities overseas in their distribution networks, and some have editions printed outside Hong Kong, in particular in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia.