During February to August 2003, I have drawn a quota sample of more than 800 journalists from 52 new organizations in 16 cities (i.e. Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xining, Nanchang, Shenzhen, Fushun, Xianyang, Tianshui, Baotou, Datong, Jinzhou, Changchou, Liuzhou, Sanming, Qionghai) to answer a six-paged self-administrative questionnaire, which mainly covers three topics: i) journalists' view on the Internet's attributes, popularity, credibility, and capacity of gratifying different needs; ii) journalists' professional beliefs, such as perceived importance of different media roles and news value criteria; iii) journalists' adoption history and use pattern of the Internet.

Based on these survey data, I will examine the AUI (Adoption-Use-Impact) process in three aspects.

First, I will test relationships between a set of personal and organizational characteristics and journalists' adoption and use of the Internet. According to journalists' initial adoption conditions, I classify those who adopted the Internet before their organizations did as "voluntary adopter", and those who adopted the Internet after their organizations did as "forced adopter". Based on relevant literature, I hypothesize significant relationships between personal characteristics and voluntary adoption, and between organizational characteristics and forced adoption. Following the same logic, I categorize journalists' use of the Internet into "personal use" and "work-related use", and hypothesize significant relationships between personal characteristics and personal use, and between organizational characteristics and work-related use.

Second, I will test relationships between four psychological constructs (Perceived Attributes of the Internet, Perceived Popularity of the Internet, Perceived Need for the Internet, and Perceived Credibility of the Internet) and journalists' adoption and use of the Internet. Based on a framework that integrates the components of the diffusion of innovation theory and uses and gratifications perspective, I hypothesize positive relationships between PAI, PPI, PNI, PCI and journalists' adoption and use of the Internet. That is to say, the more positive an journalist perceives the Internet to be, the more likely he/she will adopt and use the Internet.

Third, I will test the impact of the adoption and use of the Internet upon Chinese journalists' professionalism. As a catalyst of the ongoing globalization of journalistic professionalism, the Internet opens a window for Chinese journalists to learn from their western peers easily. Meanwhile, as an alternative mass medium, it also triggers increasing demands for Chinese journalists to redefine professional values. Therefore, I hypothesize that the adoption and use of the Internet might lead Chinese journalists i) to depart from the party-assigned roles (e.g. "mouthpiece role", "indoctrination role") and share the same roles with their western peers (e. g. "information role", "watchdog role"), and ii) to downplay the news value criteria that emphasize "propaganda worthiness" and attach more importance to criteria that emphasize "news worthiness".