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China Digital Times

Challenges Entered: 
China Digital Times is an uncensored news portal covering China's political and social transformation. CDT uses the power of the Internet to bridge the language and cultural gap and overcome state censorship.

China Digital Times (CDT) is a collaborative news website covering China's social and political transformation and its emerging role in the world. CDT aims to use web 2.0 technologies to build an uncensored news portal that will aggregate, report and translate news from both a global perspective and directly from the Chinese media and blogosphere.

Our goal is to harness the full capacity of web technologies and user-generated content to create an in-depth, truth-telling information community about China and its ongoing transition. CDT takes a participatory media approach to bridging the language and cultural gap and overcoming political censorship in order to shine the spotlight on one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century: China's democratic transition, sustainable development and peaceful emergence in the global community.

WHAT WE NEED:

We need funds to build an expanded editorial team who can collectively work around the clock to edit, aggregate, translate and report the ever-growing information about China. We also need a technology support team to maintain and test innovative new technologies to increase our capacities as an aggregator and news site. Finally, we need a tech team who can find a variety of creative ways to circumvent China's state censorship to make our content available inside China.

Project Details
Project url: 
http://chinadigitaltimes.net
Supporting organization: 
Berkeley China Internet Project, The Graduate School of Journalism of University of California at Berkeley
Project Assessment
Sustainability Model: 
Started as a class project of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley, China Digital Times has been supported by foundation grants for the past three years. We have now become the most frequently visited English-language news site about China in the world with a fast-growing community and readership. We aim to become a self-sustainable online media, supported by advertising, subscriptions, and other value-added services. By targeting our rapidly-growing, China-interested readership and the broader overseas Chinese community, we envision a successful revenue stream from pay per click advertising, banner ads, interactive advertising and various subscription services.
Project goals: 
In March 2005, we launched a completely redesigned site under a new domain name: chinadigitaltimes.net. That month, CDT attracted 19,934 unique visitors with 114,835 page views. Two years later, the number of monthly unique visitors has reached 62,096, with 598,403 page views. Within the next three months, we aim to attract 100,000 unique visitors per month.We plan to implement a comprehensive site overhaul, moving to a new publishing platform with a new design.We also plan to increase the current 2 half-time staff positions to 5 full-time positions to meet our current demands.  
Identified Obstacles: 
Our primary obstacle is a lack of sufficient resources to harvest the explosion of content available in Chinese cyberspace and make it available to our non-Chinese readers. Another obstacle is China's Internet blocking. However, we have already confronted this problem when our site was blocked inside China in 2006. Since then, our readership inside China has continued to grow as Internet users find ways to circumvent the blockage and we have found alternative ways to make our content available to them. Our main readership remains outside China and their numbers continue to grow rapidly.

Location

Berkeley, CA
United States
See map: Google Maps
Submitted by cdtimes on April 4, 2007 - 10:27pm

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