BEIJING, Oct. 10 (Xinhua) -- As participants to the first-ever World Media Summit voiced their views to the challenges and opportunities brought by new media to traditional news providers, Zhao Rui, 30, a sales manager of a Beijing-based chemical company, read the news about the summit through her cell phone.

    For Her mother, a retired Chinese teacher, however, such information is obtained when she watched news programs on the China Central Television (CCTV) hours later.

    "We make different choices, which are suitable for each of us," said Zhao.

    In an era featured by digital revolution, Chinese traditional media have gradually opened its arms to embrace new digital technologies in a bid to compete, or cope with new media, with the Internet as the flagship.

    New technologies are creating rapid changes in audience expectations, and China is a prime example of the global changes in communication, said Richard Jeremy Sambrook, director of the BBC's Global News.

    China has become the largest Internet market in the world with 338 million online users. It also tops the world's mobile phone market with a stunning cell phone population of over 680 million while more than 100 million users surf the Internet via mobile phones.

    New media forms, such as online news websites and mobile phone news services, have mushroomed in China as the numbers of newspaper buyers and radio listeners slumped.

    Studies on China's new media industry show that the market of new media is estimated to grow by 30 percent to 40 percent in the coming three years and the market volume is expected to exceed 300billion yuan (43.9 billion U.S. dollars) by 2011.

    The rise of new media drain advertisements and readers of print media, but also offer paths to survival for old media and its brands by making content and brand universally accessible on a wide variety of platforms, said Jeffrey Gralnick, an NBC News special consultant.

    Huang Bin, editor-in-chief of the Guangdong-based Yang cheng Evening Newspaper Group, shares similar ideas with his foreign peers.

    "Those so-called web-related media are more like vehicles on an expressway of Internet, while traditional media are trucks on a country road," said Huang.

    "However, it doesn't necessarily mean that the high-speed vehicles will replace those trucks, because sooner or later, the trucks will upgrade their equipment to ride on the highway," he said.

    According to Huang, the real advantage of digital media is that they get rid of the "give-and-receive" relationship between traditional media and their audience, instead, they offer the audience more options, more active participation and a great sense of ownership, thus creating a highly interactive, integrated relationship.

    "Only by relying on new digital technologies, using different carriers and recreating and spreading their content, can newspaper groups march forward on the digital road," he said.

    As one of the pioneers to integrate newspaper with Internet in China, Huang's newspaper launched a website nine years ago.

    In addition, the newspaper also unveiled the first e-magazine in southern China and mobile phone newspaper service in 2005.

    "Now, we have 500,000 paid subscribers for mobile news services, the largest in Guangdong," he said.

    At the same time, domestic media giants, such as Xinhua News Agency, CCTV and China Radio International, have expanded their services by providing online and mobile phone news services, both in text and video forms.

    "For traditional media, it's not the time to talk about change or not, but to find ways to changes as quickly and effectively as possible," said Peng Lan, a journalism professor with the Beijing-based Renmin University of China.

    "We are not expected to become new media replacing all the traditional ones, but to build a platform to better serve the netizens," said Chen Juhong, editor-in-chief of China-based Tencent.com.

    "No matter they are old media or new media, we are facing the same challenges to honestly and vividly record the changes of the country and the world. We should work together," said Chen.

Special Report: World Media Summit