Song Yang (right), consul general in Rio de Janeiro, visits Xinhua World Cup editing center in Brazil. [Pan Chaoyue / Xinhua]

China's Xinhua News Agency, the state media of China, has sent its largest ever reporting team to cover the 2014 FIFA World Cup for Chinese-, English- and Spanish-language services as well as social media as the international event has lead to intense media competition both at home and abroad.

The 49 journalists and photographers from Xinhua account for nearly half of China's accredited press corps at the World Cup and are dispersed to the 12 Brazilian hosting cities to cover all of the matches firsthand.

Thanks to its close relationship with the event's governing body FIFA, Xinhua not only received nearly half of the World Cup accreditation cards allocated to Chinese press, but also received all media tickets beforehand. That guaranteed the reporting team could cover all the news of each team, pre-match training and press conferences, as Chinese football fans are getting ready to spend many a sleepless night to watch the World Cup live half a world away.

"Although the Chinese football team didn't qualify for the finals, people in China still pay close attention to the World Cup. The media competition is very intense. Therefore it's a huge responsibility to fully cover the event," said Xue Jianying, manager of Xinhua's World Cup reporting team in Brazil.

"To organize such a large-scale coverage is challenging, especially in such a large country," Xue added, mentioning delayed flights and limited number of hotels in big cities such as Rio.

It's the first time Xinhua has established an editing office in the host city of Rio, while back in Beijing, an editing team of 40 journalists works around the clock to guarantee continuous coverage of the event.

To take advantage of multi-media and better interact with readers and fans, Xinhua also attaches great importance to weibo, a twitter-like social media which tracks the latest news from the World Cup, and its newly-issued app called "Xinhua release" which has World Cup news as its top promotion.

Xinhuatone.com, an integrated news service of Xinhua, also combines written reports, photos and new media, from which Xinhua clients can pick and choose what they want.

Reporting on this year's World Cup is especially challenging as most of the matches are held after midnight Beijing time. Xinhua is trying to report the event from angles different from television to attract a larger audience.

Contact the writer at [email protected]