Newsstands dot the street corners of China’s major cities, and each day the country’s netizens cram into Internet cafés to surf the web and connect with friends online. Last year alone, Chinese readers purchased 50 billion newspapers and the government reported 163 million regular Internet café users—roughly one-third of China’s total Internet population.

According to panelists at the Dec. 7 China's Changing Media Landscape event, organized by Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC), now is both an exciting and a challenging time to be a journalist in China.

Changes in China’s media landscape go hand in hand with today’s rapid economic, social, and political reforms, said Shorenstein APARC associate director for research Daniel C. Sneider as he opened the event. He described Caixin Media, recipient of the 2011 Shorenstein Journalism Award, as the “first truly independent media company in China.”

“We need to try harder to get a scoop, but I think it’s a nice problem to have.”
-Hu Shuli, Editor-in-Chief, Caixin Media

Hu Shuli, editor-in-chief of Caixin Media and a former Stanford Knight Journalism Fellow, said that China’s number of quality investigative and independent media outlets keeps growing. “We need to try harder to get a scoop,” she said. “But I think it’s a nice problem to have.”

Hu called technology a “double-edged sword” in that it can be manipulated in order to spread rumors and incite unproductive debates. She said, however, that the popularity of the Internet and mobile devices offers Chinese journalists the opportunity to publish news faster and reach the public through social media platforms like the country’s most popular micro-blog service Sina Weibo, which has approximately 230 million user accounts.

Caixin managing editor Wang Shuo spoke of the efforts by Caixin and other independent Chinese media outlets to gain an international audience. “China presents one of the most exciting stories of our time,” he said.

Caixin and the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal publish one another’s news stories on a monthly basis. Wang said that the modest amount of “bartered” content is not the point. “It means that a major U.S. newspaper recognizes that Caixin is up to international standards,” he said.

Ben Hu, a reporter with Southern Weekend and a current Stanford Knight Fellow, said that China’s tough licensing system makes it difficult for publications to grow. Without a license, he said, online publications cannot attract banner advertising—their real source of income. Hu spoke of a computer-coder-turned-online-news-publisher who draws half-a-million visitors to his website daily, but still cannot make a profit from it.

China’s weak copyright protection system is another major issue facing journalists today, he said. Start-up publications often plunder “real” articles and rehash the content to avoid paying a fee to license it.

Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations and the recipient of the 2003 Shorenstein Journalism Award, said that as the traditional U.S. media industry declines, China’s continues to grow more vibrant. On the flip side, however, he said that aggressive industry competition and the state’s system of licensing and censorship challenges journalists.

But China’s system of media control may also have an inadvertent upside, Schell suggested. It may slow the spread of a dumbing down of content in television and other areas of the media, following the commerce-driven model of the U.S. media industry.

The panel discussion concluded with a lively question-and-answer session from the standing-room-only audience of members from the Stanford community and general public. Questions ranged from the role of technology in the media to China’s system of censorship.

Hu Shuli and Wang accepted the Shorenstein Journalism Award on behalf of Caixin Media at a dinner ceremony held later that day at Stanford. The event marked the first time that an Asian media outlet or journalist has won the award.

Stepping into Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, a first-time visitor might wonder how the company’s employees ever accomplish anything. Wide-open work, meeting, and lounge spaces replace the traditional cubicle-office environment.

Corporate Affiliates Visiting Fellows recently toured the Facebook facility—a former Hewlett Packard building—and learned about the company’s open and creative work culture.

As the fellows walked through the complex, Facebook employee Melissa Traham explained that the social media giant’s key work values include:

• Open, collaborative teamwork
• Transparency in meetings and projects
• Trust to suggest and carry out ideas
• Connectedness through social and special interest activities

Traham also showed the fellows an enclosed space—the “war room”—where bugs are worked out before Facebook launches a new feature. Otherwise all work, meeting, and lounge spaces are open and airy.

“They must be doing something right,” says Corporate Affiliates program manager Denise Masumoto.

Although Facebook has only resided at its current location for a few short years, it leaves its Palo Alto home sometime in 2012 for the old Sun Microsystems campus in nearby Menlo Park.

Through their visit, the fellows walked the halls of history in a young company continually moving forward.

Eight-four percent of Fortune Global 100 companies worldwide now utilize at least one social media platform (SMP), indicates a recent study by the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller.

Numerous statistical studies such as this exist, but how do we understand the numbers in terms of the actual impact of SMPs on business?

Despite the growing adoption of SMPs as a business tool, this is still a relatively new and under-studied area of technology—even in Silicon Valley where many SMP innovations originate, says Rafiq Dossani, a senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). Dossani defines SMPs as “information and communications technology platforms designed for interaction among participants.” He and other academic and industry experts convened at Stanford on May 25 for a discussion of SMP business trends, especially in the areas of recruitment and business development in Silicon Valley.

Their goal? To begin developing a theoretical framework for the study of SMPs as a tool in today’s global business environment. Findings presented during the conference suggest that SMPs serve as another tool for doing business, but do not supplant existing systems and practices. In addition, a great deal of future research is needed on the subject.

Organized by Shorenstein APARC’s Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE), the conference was the sixth in an annual series dedicated to examining the globalization of business services. Previous conferences have addressed topics including outsourcing, system integrators, international recruitment, and clean technologies.

Opening the first session about social media trends among Silicon Valley employers, Philip Jordan and Stephen Jordan of Green LMI Consulting presented findings from a recent survey they conducted of over three hundred firms, especially of larger and technology-related companies. Their study found that over half of Silicon Valley firms surveyed are utilizing social media for external communication and/or for the recruitment and evaluation of new employees, pointing to the utility for job seekers to maintain a professional-looking online presence. Nonetheless, they emphasized that “real” skills and expertise still matter the most to employers.

Manuel Serapio, faculty director and associate professor of international business at the University of Colorado Denver (UC Denver) moderated the panel discussion that followed. Panelists Rahim Fazal, CEO and co-founder of Involver, and Tuomo Nikulainen, a researcher at ETLA, the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, provided commentary during the session.

Dossani led the second session about social media in the workplace with a presentation summarizing a study he conducted on the value of SMPs to business organizations. Surveying employees at twenty Silicon Valley companies, Dossani tested the hypothesis that a SMP has value “only if it improves the reliability of existing information or enables the generation of new information.” SMPs do not automatically generate such information, he stated. Some SMPs are better at generating reliable information (eg., a CEO’s blog) and others enable the generation of new information (eg., a discussion forum). Dossani categorized SMPs in the study by the extent of collaboration they permitted among participants in the creation of new information, as well as the control that was possible over the flow of information. Depending on how the usage of an SMP is organized—who participates and its governance structure—information of potential value to corporates is generated. Dossani noted the difference between individual SMPs, such as Twitter, and websites, such as YouTube, that integrate a number of different social media functions, including video and discussion forums.

In the study, Dossani proposed a theoretical framework for research on SMP business trends, informed by work about strong and weak “ties” conducted by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. The survey results indicated that SMPs are found useful for project management (low control/high collaboration SMPs) and building employee and consumer awareness (high control/low collaboration SMPs). While this provided support for the hypothesis, said Dossani, other evidence did not support it, such as the limited use of SMPs for human resource functions and strategic planning. This might be due to the nascency of technologies, lack of diversity of platforms, or limited familiarity with the potential of SMPs—clearly, exciting subjects for future research, he concluded.

Henry S. Rowen, co-director of SPRIE, moderated the panel discussion that accompanied Dossani’s presentation. Panelists included Matt Ceniceros, director of global media relations at Applied Materials; Ankit Jain, a software engineer at Google; Don McCullough, vice president of marketing for IP and broadband at Ericsson; and Saurabh Mittal, head of customer experience practice at Wipro.

Emerging from the conference is the understanding that companies are increasingly embracing SMPs as a tool to enhance their current business practices, but not uniformly. To understand the role of SMPs in business—both in Silicon Valley and worldwide—a theoretical framework, such as Dossani suggested, and further studies are needed.

Papers and slides from the two main presentations are now available online, with full audio from the event to be added soon.

In addition to longtime Globalization of Business Services conference co-sponsors Wipro, UC Denver, and ETLA, Adobe and Ericsson also provided co-sponsorship for this year’s event.