China's top-ranking Fudan University and the United States' Columbia University will launch financial and business courses for Chinese journalists in Shanghai in July.

Both universities are well-known for excellent journalism programs. The newly launched courses are part of Columbia's efforts to teach developing nations how to report financial and business news.

According to sources with the Shanghai-based Fudan University, the courses will touch upon topics such as privatization, trade agreements, financial crisis, labor migration, economic globalization and functions of international financial institutions. The classes target Chinese journalists' skills in covering international business and financial events.

Lecturers include Nobel-Prize-winner economist Joseph E. Stiglitz; Jonathan Kaufman, a Pulitzer Award winner and front-page editor of Wall Street Journal; David Armstrong, Chief Editor of South China Morning Post; Columbia journalism professor Anya Schiffrin and directors of global media giants in the Asia-Pacificregion.

It is Fudan's biggest endeavor so far to upgrade China's financial and business news coverage, said Zhao Kai, dean of Fudan's journalism school.

Against the backdrop of fast economic and social development, financial and business media boomed in China in recent years. This has lead to the widening gap between Chinese readers' increasing demand for quality business news and China's relatively small pool of eligible business journalists who can have the demand met.

The newly launched courses are widely expected to bridge the gap and followed by more similar programs, according to Fudan sources.
 
(Xinhua News Agency July 19, 2004)