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Critical reporting (piping-baodao) has long been considered one of the most important journalistic tools in China, exhibiting great democratic potential. However, the media environment for such reporting has become precarious over the past decade, raising the questions of how much space is left for critical reporting and how it is related to the media–state dynamics. Drawing on a 15-year longitudinal content analysis of how The Beijing News—an outspoken newspaper—reported corruption, this study explored the evolution of critical reporting in China. The results revealed that critical reporting is still a small-scale, non-routine journalistic practice. A detailed analysis was conducted to determine how media resources and power relations shaped critical reporting. The results showed that critical reporting has tended to take a resource-intense format and require non-official sources. Furthermore, critical reporting was more pronounced with respect to the coverage of low-ranking officials and officials outside the newspaper's parent region. Broader implications of these findings have been discussed. Overall, the present study advances the understanding of critical journalism in an authoritarian context and explores its relations with the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes with in-depth knowledge on how algorithmic news recommendation is adopted within the Scandinavian daily press and how notions of gatekeeping affect the use of these systems. News recommender systems provide news organisations with new opportunities to offer more relevant and personalised news experiences, but their increasing use has also raised several concerns about whether and how algorithms should undertake important editorial decisions. Current literature offers only limited empirical insight into the actual use of these technologies in journalism, and this study is the first to map the use of and perceptions on algorithmic news recommendation within the Scandinavian news market. Drawing on interviews with all 19 national newspapers within the Scandinavian daily press, the findings reveal that while most newspapers use news recommender systems in some form, the extent of their use is still limited due to concerns over the shared news sphere and a reluctance to transfer editorial control. Some newspapers address these concerns in the use of news recommendation by upholding traditional gatekeeping control on certain parts of the website, while others have built editorial control into the systems themselves, indicating that Scandinavian newspapers normalise algorithmic news recommendation by adopting a traditional gatekeeping role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]