Has Alibaba changed SCMP?

There is a maritime sign in the nautical international signal flag, which indicates that “My ship is willing to communicate with your ship”.

The inspiration out of the signal was applied into a logo by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in February 2018.

SCMP is one of Hong Kong's most credible and competitive English-language media, with a history of 113 years.

And it tried to use the logo to express that "I want to talk with you, I want to communicate with you.”

However, in November 2015, Alibaba announced that it would buy SCMP and Alibaba in April 2016 became the Post’s parent company. Many people are speculating that this acquisition may affect the objectivity and attitude of the Post.

Does media ownership really affect editorial independence? Is SCMP really changing?

"We believe that through mergers or acquisitions, the largest shareholder of the new owner can obtain the right to speak, determine the business practices, resource allocation and personnel appointments of the media organizations, thus affecting the number of people in the news report, the subject matter choice, the content etc. Therefore, the mergers and acquisitions and investment actions of Beijing represent not only the expansion of their discourse, but also their ability to control the media. - Du Yaoming, Xie Tao, Qu Jia Ling 2018 HKJA Annual Report 2018

我们相信，通过并购或入股，新东主最大股东可取得话事权，决定传媒机构的经营手法、资源分配和人事任命，从而影响新闻报道的人手多少、题材取舍、内容轻重、角度焦点等等，因此北京及同路人的并购及投资举动，既代表其言论版图的扩张，也标示其控制媒体能力的提升。——杜耀明、谢颂昕、区家鳞 2018香港言论自由年度报告

With the recognition that ownership is important, there is a second sentence: ownership is just one of many factors that influence news report. Because the operation of a professional media is a complex system, the main influencing factors include: position in market, readers’needs, and very important: the independence of editors and the professionalism they hold. In a media company, the editorial reporter is of course working for the big boss, but the profession they are engaged in is not a screw. (the example that SCMP was bought by Jack Ma remains to be observe, but at least at present it hasn’t brought any obvious changes to the content.) - Fang Kecheng, "NewsLab"

所有制很重要，但在承认所有制很重要的前提下，还有第二句话，那就是：所有制只是影响新闻内容的诸多因素之一，在成熟、专业的新闻媒体，有很多其他因素会削弱所有制带来的影响。因为一家专业媒体的运作是一个复杂的系统，其中主要的影响因素包括：市场定位、读者需求，以及非常非常重要的：编辑记者的主体性，以及他们所秉持的新闻专业主义。在一家媒体公司里，编辑记者当然是在给大老板打工，但他们所从事的职业，并不是言听计从的螺丝钉。（马云的例子还有待观察，但至少现在的《南华早报》和马云买下来之前没有太大区别）——方可成

We interviewed different related people, such as journalists working with SCMP and some professors. They held different views and the former chief editor of SCMP said that he would give no comment but the judgement should depend on the analysis of its content.

About the dataset

One of the most difficult part is to get the dataset in the beginning. We called and consulted the SCMP and they told us that even their subscribers could not get access to the news about past two months, and the employees also couldn't read all the news about the past few years.

When we narrowly gave up…luckily, we found a database called ProQuest from the website of Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). There are news texts from the Post from 1993 to 2018. Some data are missing, such as bylines in news in recent years. We scraped headlines of the SCMP articles from 2010 to 2018 and obtained 263,107 data points in total.

At the same time, we also obtained a questionnaire made by a group of master students from HKBU. The survey showed that the main reason for 81 students to read the Post was that they thought it have a high degree of credibility.

Robert Kuok and Jack Ma, more news about Jack Ma

Before analyzing the data, we had some directions and clues through interviews with other people or other conversations.

Gary Liu, CEO of SCMP, gave a speech in HKBU in October. Unsurprisingly he was asked that if the editorial board was still choosing its own topics. Gary said at least the Alibaba didn’t give any pressure to their editors at present and he hoped it would not happen in the future.

Some held the view that the change might have taken place as early as in 1997, the handover year when tycoon Robert Kwuk was in charge of the Post.

Robert Kwuk, the richest man in Malaysia, founded the Shangri-La. Robert’s family had close ties with Chinese senior government officials due to their economic and social contribution to the mainland, China.

Some observers pointed out that Robert helped purifying the criticism of the Chinese government, but Robert denied. According to Huxiu media, on 7 June, 2012, a foreign part-time editor of the Post, Alex Price, wrote an email to the editor-in-chief Wang Xiangwei, critisizing that SCMP had lost its credibility in certain news.

Guo Zhongshi, a professor at the Department of Communication at HKBU, believes that after the post was bought by Alibaba, its editors may remind themselves that their boss is Jack Ma while writing news, and then they are prone to cater to what Jack Ma loves to read.

However, it is difficult to define what kind of content that Jack Ma likes, but a few days ago, a very interesting headline appeared in the Post: Jack Ma is a Communist Party member, so what?

A source said that Jack Ma’s Alibaba is a company which has the closet relationship with the government and many executives in Alibaba have worked for government departments. Through analyzing headlines from 2010 to 2018, we found that the time that the Post mentioned Jack Ma was increasing, and that the frequency that his company Alibaba appeared in the Post was higher than other companies in the BAT category.

Accodring to the Post, its readers are from the whole world rather than only from China.Alibaba’s vice president Joe Tsai also indicated that the purpose of buying SCMP was to show a better image of China. All these kinds of signs have increased the speculation that the Post has become pro-Beijing.

promotional content increases while controversial content remains

What’s the problem about G20?

Annie Zhang, former editor chief of Initium media, provided a clue which was to analyze some news on specific days such as G20 summit. Zhang thinks the Post is still reporting some sensitive issues. In fact, we can still read the news about Liu Xiaobo and Tiananmen Square Crackdown. But at the same time, positive and propaganda reports are frequent,showing a good image of China to the world.

Zhang said the news reports of G20 summit in the Post become highly similar to those of newspapers such as China Daily andGlobal Times. Regarding it as a clue, we specially analyzed the news about G20 summit appearing in SCMP and also the news from China Daily. In 2015, the Post and Alibaba were still in the takeover transition phase and there was almost no headlines about G20 on 15 and 16 November

By contrast, China Daily had a series of news reports related to G20 in 2014.

And then in 2016, the 11th G20 summit was held in China, to be specific, in Hangzhou where the headquarter of Alibaba is located. This year the Post started to report news about G20, but the quantity was far less than that in 2017.

Now, the South China Morning Post has a G20 column.

What can we talk about Xi?

we analyzed annual word frequency of news from 2010 to 2018, and we pay much attention to 2012 and 2018, the two landmark years for China’s leaders.

As you can see, in 2012, Bo Xilai and Xi Jinping appeared many times in the news' headlines and in that year China was preparing to replace its leaders.

By 2018, the present Xi has amended the constitution, removed the president’s term limit and emphasized that the party leads the government, military, society..

It was also a huge change. However, the name of Xi didn’t appear as many times as it did in 2012. Thus it was assumed that the Post deliberately evaded something.

However, the Post has been the very first to report that the Communist Party's military heavyweight tigers was investigated at that time, and we still can see that there are news talking about Xi's amendment.

At the same time, based on the limited data, we roughly found that the number of the Post's foreign journalists showed an upward trend, and all of these may exactly be a signal that SCMP proves its neutrality and objectivity to the outside world.

It seems that change is happening in an unobvious way and is hard to be perceived.

Team members: Xu Wen, Yao Nuan, Li Yijie