据美国《华尔街日报》报道，中国官方通讯社新华社很快将其位于纽约的办公室升格为北美总部，并将总部办公室搬迁到纽约时代广场附近的百老汇大街1540号、位于第45街和第46街之间的一栋44层大楼上，预计新华社会将大楼的顶层全部租下来，租期为20年。这里堪称是美国的媒体中心，汇集有多家世界级媒体，如《纽约时报》、汤姆森路透集团和孔蒂纳斯特杂志集团等。

　　对于办公室的搬迁，新华社的相关负责人表示目的在于提高新闻报道量。而在办公室搬迁之后，新华社还将增加人手。对此，美国加州大学洛杉矶分校研究中国媒体发展的教授拉塞尔·粱说：“新华社将总部搬到时代广场附近基本上意味着一个新时代的到来，也就是它想成为全球一流媒体的新时代。中国逐渐意识到在全球舞台上，软实力和硬实力一样重要。”目前，中国已经实施媒体走出去战略，在经济实力增长的同时提升中国在国际社会的话语权，打破西方国家对国际舆论的主导。新华社作为中国的旗舰媒体更是动作频频，不久前它已经推出全球英文电视频道。而在中国国内，新华社在财经新闻方面加大投入，与世界顶级财经新闻提供商彭博社以及路透社等展开竞争。

　　目前，新华社与该大楼的业主就有关租赁协议的谈判已经进入收尾阶段。至于租金，新华社的相关负责人并没有透露，不过根据当地的一些房产中介公司透露，在时代广场这样的黄金地段商业地产每平方英尺的月租金是67美元。新华社并非第一家在纽约中心地带租赁地产的中国实体，之前，北京的万通地产公司就签下合同要在正在建设的世界贸易中心上租下19万平方英尺的办公室，在那里建立一个中国中心。

纽约时报文章(2010年7月1日):

China Puts Best Face Forward With News Channel
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI — The Xinhua News Agency, China’s dominant news service and the propaganda arm of the Communist Party, introduced a 24-hour English-language news channel and is preparing to open a prominent newsroom in Times Square, part of an expensive push to increase the reach and influence of the Chinese news media overseas.

The president of Xinhua, Li Congjun, said Thursday at a press conference in Beijing that CNC World, the agency’s new 24-hour news channel, was part of a government effort to “present an international vision with a Chinese perspective.”

The announcement is the strongest sign yet that China intends to spend billions of dollars over the next few years to create a global media empire that can match the country’s rising economic and diplomatic power and more effectively project its views to an international audience.

Beijing officials have long complained that China is often portrayed unfavorably in the Western media and that what it considers biased news coverage has hurt the country’s interests abroad.

The new channel, which media experts say appears to be modeled on Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network, aims to provide comprehensive coverage of world affairs, while explaining matters of direct concern to the Chinese leadership in a perspective its producers consider appropriate.

Analysts say China’s global media expansion is striking because many Western media giants, faced with an advertising slump, have scaled back operations by closing bureaus and laying off employees.

“While our media empires are melting away like the Himalayan glaciers, China’s are expanding,” said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York and a former dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley. “They want to get every hallmark of the world of credible journalism they can, and being in New York City, in an iconic location, is part of that.”

On Thursday, an official with Xinhua, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, said Xinhua was planning to build a newsroom at the top of a 44-story skyscraper in Times Square, giving it an address in the same neighborhood as Reuters, Conde Nast, News Corp and The New York Times.

Xinhua’s move is just one of several planned by Beijing. China Central Television, the country’s biggest state-run television broadcaster, has also been expanding overseas and offering broadcasts in English, Spanish, French, Arabic and other languages. And China has heavily financed a makeover of China Daily, its English-language daily newspaper, and introduced a new English edition of Global Times, which is controlled by People’s Daily, the leading Communist Party-run newspaper.

Whether state-run news services financed and controlled by Beijing can attract a big international audience or earn significant revenues overseas remains uncertain. Many media experts say Chinese news agencies, though improving, lack credible and objective reporting and are widely perceived to be propaganda vehicles for the Chinese government.

“We’ve criticized them a lot because they’re a propaganda tool,” said Clothilde Le Coz, the Washington director of Reporters Without Borders. “So the fact that they want to expand in the U.S., we’d like to see what that would look like.”

There have also been reports over the years that some of China’s state-run news agencies are closely tied to state intelligence agencies. Xinhua got its start in 1931 as the Red China News Agency, even before the Communist Party gained power in 1949.

Xinhua still functions as China’s official news bureau, releasing government reports and official statements for Politburo members, and setting the tone for China’s other heavily censored news publications, which are often instructed to republish Xinhua dispatches on major news events without alteration.

On Thursday, the agency said in announcing its new 24-hour English news channel that it hoped to offer a “better view of China to its int