The China Media Map is a vision in progress. Our hope is that the tool will eventually assist journalists, researchers or anyone with a general interest in China in following China's own conversation about itself -- in any language. As you experiment with the tool, please do offer us your feedback and suggestions as to what improvements can be made.

The tool is based at present on data provided publicly by China's General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP), the government agency that oversees all print media. It will eventually be extended to include broadcast and Internet media.

After mapping GAPP data on the Google Maps platform, we enabled users to to navigate to various media by clicking on cities or regions and specifying a radius (1, 10 or 50 km). The media results returned in the right-hand field are set for automatic translation in the language of your browser, so that non-readers of Chinese can scroll over the media on the list and receive instant (albeit imperfect) translations.

Once you click on media, the information from GAPP (including license number, address and other contacts) will appear at the bottom of the map. If media have a Web URL listed in the GAPP database, the link will appear with a Google Translate option. Click the translate option and you can read their online content in any language of your choice.

If you are trying to locate a particular print media, just type in the name in the search bar at the top of the right-hand field on the Media Map. If you use the correct Chinese name, the media should appear below the search bar once you've hit "go." You can try media names in the language of your browser as well, and possible results will appear below.

We will continue to curate and add to the GAPP data, providing more URLs and ensuring existing ones are accurate. We also hope to include other tools, such as mapping of sudden-breaking stories with associated Chinese coverage, and multi-lingual keyword searches to give you Chinese news results for a range of topics in your own language.

Developers are encouraged to visit the JMSC's new developer blog, the Rice Cooker.

The possibilities are virtually infinite, so please share your ideas.

David Bandurski, Project Researcher
Cedric Sam, Geo/Web Developer