Media in China: Can't beat 'em,
join 'em By Wu Zhong, China
Editor
HONG KONG - If you can't beat them,
join them. This appears to be the new strategy
adopted by Chinese newspapers in their battle
against the so-called "new media" such as the
Internet - websites, weblogs and vlogs
(video-blogs) - as well as messaging services on
mobile phones.
And China's General
Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP)
now encourages newspapers to develop their own
digitized products to compete with the new media.
At the third annual Conference on
Competitive Edge in China's Press Industry in Beijing early this month,
the GAPP unveiled its 11th Five-Year Projection
(2006-10) for China's press industry, which
encourages traditional print media to develop
digital
products and provide
value-added information services.
The
conference, attended by editors-in-chief of all
major newspapers across China, was convened amid
deep concerns with the future of the print media
as newspaper advertising income recorded zero
growth in 2005.
Thanks to China's fast
economic development since the late 1970s, Chinese
newspapers and the print media in general enjoyed
double-digit growth in profits annually for more
than a decade - until last year.
A market
research report jointly released by Tsinghua
University and the Chinese Social Sciences
Academic Press (SAPP) has pointed out that 2005
was the "turning point" for newspapers, the year
when their profit growth began to slow down
dramatically as the Internet rapidly ate into
their advertising.
In fact, advertising
income for most of the 1,900-plus Chinese
newspapers dropped in the first half of last year,
with some recording a 40% drop off year-on-year.
This was in sharp contrast to the previous decade,
when newspapers' advertising income averaged 33%
growth each year.
On the other hand, the
online advertising market in China has been rising
rapidly. According to the Shanghai-based
iResearch, China's online advertising market
totaled 1.9 billion yuan (US$238 million) in 2004,
up 75.9% from 2003. And iResearch's projections
may be still too conservative. The latest
statistics from advertiser Ogilvy show that
China's online advertising market grew 77.1% from
2004 to reach 3.1 billion yuan in 2005, ranking
fourth among all media, and exceeding magazine
advertising income for the first time. China's
online advertising market is predicted to reach
4.6 billion yuan in 2006, up 48% from 2005, and
hit 15.7 billion by 2010.
Take one
example. The popular Internet portal Sina.com,
which is listed on Nasdaq, reported that its net
business income totaled US$53.7 million in the
second quarter of this year, up 45% from a year
before.
So obviously, the market share of
newspapers has been gobbled up by the new media,
particularly the Internet. The market for
newspaper advertising in China currently is
estimated to be about 30 billion yuan. Analysts
believe the print media will soon lose their
dominance in the market with the challenge from
new media. Alarmed by the aggressive
challenge, some newspapers want to fight back, and
are trying to form an alliance to ban websites
from using their content for free.
Last
November, editors-in-chief of major tabloid-style
metro dailies gathered for an annual meeting in
Nanjing and issued a "Nanjing Declaration"
proclaiming they would no longer tolerate the free
use of their content by commercial websites.
And at a forum in Guangzhou in January,
the Liberation Daily, the Shanghai Communist
Party's flagship newspaper, appealed to 39 major
Communist Party newspapers to form an alliance to
"safeguard their intellectual-property rights".
An angry Yin Minghua, Liberation Daily's
publisher, said: "The cost of running a
comprehensive daily is in the tens of millions of
yuan a year. But when we provide our good-quality
news and information to the Internet media, we are
simply given tens of thousands of yuan in return."
But the major theme of the third annual
Conference on Competitive Edge in China's Press
Industry put an end to hints of a boycott of the
new media. Instead, the new strategy Chinese
newspapers are going to adopt is described as "if
you cannot beat them, join them". So they now are
prepared to march into the field of the new media
to fight for their own survival. This may prove a
much wiser strategy.
In an interview with
the Beijing News on the sideline of the
conference, Shi Feng, vice minister of the SAPP,
said digitization was necessary for newspapers in
the face of challenges from the new media. "There
is a trend toward the integration of the print
media with the new media. The digitized newspaper
could be a product of such integration,'' Shi
said.
Shi also called on newspapers to
stop what he called "vicious competition'' among
themselves and to enhance cooperation to take up
the challenges posed by the new media.
Wang Chunfu, editor-in-chief of Southern
Metropolitan News, said innovation was the key to
his paper's rapid development over the past year.
"We insist on improvement of newspaper quality,
and we're also innovating our publishing format,
such as starting an e-newspaper," he said. The
newspaper now has more than 100,000 subscribers
who read it on their mobile phones.
Wang
refuted claims that newspapers are a fading
industry under challenge from the new media:
"Cooperating with new media and making good use of
advanced technologies is the future of print
media."
In fact, Shanghai's Liberation
Daily became the first to launch an electronic
newspaper on April 4, despite its publisher's
earlier call to boycott the Internet.
Guangzhou-based Nanfang Media Group, owner
of the Nanfang Daily, the outspoken Southern
Weekend, the 21st Century Business Herald and the
Southern Metropolitan News, and a joint owner of
the Beijing News, is set to expand its business
aggressively into the new media.
"In face
of the new media's challenges, we can no longer be
content with publishing newspapers. We must
integrate our tradition and method of running
newspapers with those of new media," Fan Yijin,
Communist Party chief of the Nanfang Media Group,
said in an interview with the China Youth Daily.
Fan disclosed that his group is set to
launch electronic newspapers and virtual
newspapers on the Internet and on mobile phones
and to expand its business into other
publications.
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