(9 Jan 2013) SHOTLIST
1. Exterior of Southern Weekly newspaper building with police guarding entrance
2. Close of sign on building, reading (Chinese) "Southern Weekly"
3. Various of police guarding entrance of Southern Weekly building
4. Protesters holding banners in front of Southern Weekly building to show supports
5. Mid of protester, tilt down to banner, reading (Chinese) "Support Southern Weekly, Fight against Abuse of Power, Defend Freedom of Speech"
6. SOUNDBITE (Mandarin), Xiao Qingshan, Protester:
"We want freedom of speech to air our real voice. If we always have censorship and the media face shutdown everyday, the media become a tool to cheat the people, is there any hope for this country?"
7. Police talking to protesters, trying to take away banners from them
8. Protester chanting slogan (Mandarin) "Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press"
9. Close of man writing tribute words on paper
10. Man putting paper with tribute and flower in front of Southern Weekly building, zoom out to him walking away
11. Flower and paper of tribute
STORYLINE
Supporters of an influential Chinese weekly newspaper protested and laid flowers in front of the newspaper building in Guangzhou on Wednesday, following an ongoing row over press censorship that turned into a test of the new Chinese leadership's tolerance for political reform.
The protest which was staged for the second day, followed a confrontation between some of the paper's journalists and a top censor after the publication was forced to change a New Year's editorial calling for political reform into a tribute praising the ruling party.
The standoff soon evolved into calls for free expression and political reform.
Under an agreement reached on Tuesday, editors and reporters at the Southern Weekly will not be punished for protesting and stopping work in anger over the propaganda official's heavy-handed rewriting of last week's editorial, according to two members of the editorial staff.
One, an editor, said propaganda officials will no longer directly censor content prior to publication.
The staff members asked not to be identified because they feared retaliation after they and other employees were told not to speak to foreign media.
Executives at the newspaper and its parent company, the state-owned Nanfang Media Group, declined comment other than to say the Southern Weekly would publish as normal on Thursday.
Aside from getting the presses rolling, the agreement appears likely to deflate the confrontation that presented a knotty challenge to Chinese leader Xi Jinping two months after taking office.
Expressions of support for the newspaper poured across the Internet and, for two days this week, protesters came by the hundreds to the gates of the compound housing the Southern Weekly.
During Wednesday's protest, some 30 uniformed police officers stood guard outside the compound.
Defusing the crisis took the intervention of Hu Chunhua, the newly installed party chief of Guangdong, the province where Guangzhou is located, according to an editorial staff member and an academic in Beijing, who asked not to be named.
The agreement to keep propaganda officials from censoring articles before they appear rolls back more intrusive controls put in place in recent months, but does not mean an end to censorship.
The Propaganda Department, which controls all media in China, relies on directives, self-censorship by editors and reporters and firings of those who do not comply to enforce the party line.
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