Beijing: Journalists may be known for their single-mindedness, but in China, they are in a single category of a different sort. The profession has the largest numbers of singletons, the survey has found.
According to matchmaking site zhenai.com, 4.8 percent of media professionals in China are single, the most among all occupations, the China Daily reported Tuesday.
“When joking about their daily routines, journalists sometimes say that they ‘wake as early as a rooster and go to bed as late as a dog’,” the China Daily report said.
“Now they have another reason to poke fun at themselves: being single.”
The zhenai.com report is based on an annual survey of single population in China in which 10,000 of its members were taken as samples.
Low salaries and tight work schedules leave journalists with little time for dating, the report said citing some media professionals.
One journalist interviewed by China Daily said that journalists remain single as they have to work overtime and on holidays and weekends to follow the news.
He said the night shift, a common schedule in newsrooms, was one major reason for a high divorce rate in the website office he worked in.
According to a 24-year-old reporter working in a news agency in Beijing, media professionals “have a hard time on the dating circuit because they don’t have a fixed schedule and have to travel frequently for interviews”.
“It’s even more difficult for those in TV news because they have to work late,” the reporter was quoted as saying.
The report cited journalists as saying that media professionals tend to spend a lot of time on internet following the news, resulting in them living in a cyber world.
Even if they get a break from work in the daytime, it does not help in terms of dating as others remain busy with their 9-to-5 schedule, the report said, citing a journalist.
The China Population Employment Statistics Yearbook 2010 figures show single Chinese men and women aged between 18 and 43 numbered nearly 180 million in 2011, 60 million of them living in urban areas.
