本文从传播功能的视角考察了先秦时期的社会传播活动，认为初期的社会传播活动主要承担着“辅佑政事”与“延揽民意”的功能，具体来看主要形式有“史官记事”、 “官方文书通讯”、“采风”、“乡校议政”等，这些活动兼具或者表现出了现代意义上大众传播活动的功能，依稀显现出新闻传播活动的多种特质，对社会的公共信息进行着有组织、有规模的及时、公开传播，在纵向和横向两个纬度交织进行，其生成的文本对当世和后世的政治生活也产生了深远影响。本文也以此重新反思了中国新闻传播事业诞生的时间问题，以及考察标准的问题，本文认为新闻事业诞生的标识应以新闻传播活动的诞生为标识，而非以“纸质媒介”的诞生为标识。

This article examines the social communication activities during pre-Qin period from the perspective of function, and considers that the early social communication activities mainly responsible for the function of "auxiliary on politics affairs" and "conform to public opinion", specifically, "official historian notes", "official documents communication", "folk songs", "township school council", etc. These activities had or showed the function of mass communication in the modern sense, faintly showing a variety of characteristics of news communication activities. They carried out organized and sized of public information communication in time, and both in vertical and horizontal interweaving latitude. These texts generated from them had a profound impact on the political life for ages. This article rethinks the question of the birth time of Chinese news media, as well as the problem of investigation standard, and we believe that the identity of the birth of journalism should be based on the birth of news communication activities rather than printed media.