COMMUNICATIONS AND THE MEDIA
The news media play a significant role in the territory's precautionary measures against sudden climatic threats alerting, informing and advising the public in the event of typhoons or rainstorms.
The Press
The Hong Kong press has a high readership. It includes 43 Chinese-language dailies and seven English-language dailies.
Of the Chinese-language dailies, 30 cover mainly general news, both local and overseas; five focus on finance; and the rest cover entertainment news, especially television and cinema news. The larger papers include overseas Chinese communities in their distribution networks, and some have editions printed outside Hong Kong, in particular in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. One of the English dailies publishes a daily Braille edition, in conjunction with the Hong Kong Society for the Blind. A total of 11 news agency bulletins, issued in Chinese, English and Japanese, are also registered as newspapers.
Hong Kong is the Southeast Asian base for many newspapers, magazines, news agencies and electronic media. Among the international news agencies with offices in Hong Kong are Agence France-Presse, Agencia EFE of Spain, Associated Press, Kyodo News Service of Japan, Reuters and United Press International. Newsweek and Time magazines have editions printed in Hong Kong, which is also the base for the regional magazines Asiaweek and Far Eastern Economic Review. The Asian Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune are also printed here.
Several organisations represent and cater for people working in the news media in Hong Kong. The Newspaper Society of Hong Kong represents Chinese and English newspaper proprietors. It is empowered to act in matters affecting the interests of its members. The Hong Kong Journalists Association is the only industry-wide union of journalists in Hong Kong. It has roughly 580 active members, an estimated one-fifth of the territory's journalists. From its beginnings in 1968 as a union with a high proportion of expatriate members, the association is now very much a local union, with Hong Kong Chinese making up about 75 per cent of its membership. The association promotes the right to freedom of expression and actively focuses on a range of press freedom and ethics concerns. Its trade union activities cover such issues as pay, labour rights and disputes, health and safety, and training.
The Foreign Correspondents' Club offers its members social facilities and a range of professional activities, including news conferences, briefings and films. The Hong Kong Press Club provides an opportunity for journalists to meet socially.
A sum of $300,000 was allocated by the Vocational Training Council to its Journalism Training Board and Advertising, Public Relations and Publishing Training Board to conduct over a dozen upgrading courses for journalists working for the mass media. The most popular courses covered Putonghua for journalists (held by the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong), interviewing techniques (by the British Council), oral communications skills for journalists (by the Hong Kong Polytechnic) and publishing seminars (by the Anglo-Chinese Textbook Publishers Association). The Journalism Training Board also provided a subsidy of $20,000 to the Hong Kong Journalists Association for the conduct of a number of short seminars and talks for reporters.
353