Volunteers to oversee the media

Tan Yijie is doing more than giving her newspaper a good half-hour read. Beginning yesterday, the 17-year-old will report any problems or factual mistakes in her newspaper to the provincial association of journalists.

"I hope that our local media will get better and better," said Tan, a senior high school student in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. Dailies, as well as news in the form of short text messages, are her major sources of information.

In a program arranged by Yunnan's publicity department, 100 citizens aged from 17 to 66 in Kunming and other Yunnan cities are acting as "voluntary media supervisors," responsible for overseeing the province's 10 newspapers.