media - What is news in China?

Yesterday I had at Narita Airport an interesting exchange with another traveler to Shanghai, and it is part of a thought process that is still very much on its way. But it might be interesting to hear your thoughts on this too.
My fellow traveler mentioned the recent hausse in media reports on large accidents and deaths in China. "Ten years ago there would be similar accidents, but the media would not write about it," he said. "Now you see happening in China, what happened ten fifteen years ago in Taiwan. The media start to report also this kind of news."
That change creates also a new dilemma for us journalists: what is news when it comes from China? Ten years ago that was much easier, since there was not that much to report about. Obvious the first reports on large scale accidents were news, but that is not going to remain like that. At Chinabiz, the headline section is a first way to deal with it. When it started off we had a set of basic benchmarks: no stories about investments under 25 million US, unless it means opening of a closed market, like the media.
Even when you look at the business news it is clear we need to develop a new way of selecting the news. Now days passes without a bank preparing for a massive IPO, today Air China joins the mayhem. Bilions of US dollar worth of news are passing by and we have no clear way for selecting news. When you only report on financial news, that might be easy, but how to deal with rest? Is the human rights issue still an issue? When China was a serious candidate for being the new arch enemy of the US after the Soviet-Union collapsed, those discussions mattered. The interest of the world seemed to move to China.
Being just an economic superpower is not enough, as Japan shows. The country is still the second economy of the world, but the media interest has collapsed, as has the number of foreign correspondents in the 1990s.
So, the question is: do we still have a story to tell the rest of the world wants to hear? That seems an interesting enough dilemma to struggle with, in the months to come.