The survival of newspapers in the Internet age

• Source: The Global Times
• [13:05 June 09 2009]
• Comments

By Bai Ping

In reporting the current economic downturn, journalists in Beijing seem to have ignored one major industry trend closest to them: the potential woes of the domestic news business.

While the news about newspapers may be all doom and gloom half a world way, street newsstands here are still piling up with national and local newspapers every day. The Global Times was launched less than two months ago, becoming the latest entrant in a very crowded market.

But following media economics, cool-headed local newspaper executives may have to admit their heyday is already over and newspapers are in the decline phase of their product life cycle.

Beijing used to be a battleground for cut-throat competition among a dozen metropolitan dailies. But now the local advertising market is dominated by four or five morning or evening newspaper publishers.

Illustration: Liu Rui

Two metropolitan dailies have been forced to become weeklies (one is now a free paper handed out at subway stations), and more are languishing on government financial support.

Some pundits have already forecast that due to an Internet-enabled freefall in readership and ad revenues, by 2025 market-driven newspapers will become an endangered species in China and only a very small number of “quality” newspapers will survive.

Besides the emergence of new communication technologies, most Chinese newspapers should also blame themselves for driving more and more readers and advertisers to the Web.

Paradoxically, they have always encouraged news portals to lift their content, at dirt-cheap prices or for free.

In China, newspaper alliances that target news portals have been formed and collapsed over and over again, because there are always some newspapers that want the aggregators to help them capture larger shares of the market, even at the cost of free content.

It has been puzzling to see that some local newsrooms have appointed promotion managers whose main responsibility is to suck up to producers at major portals so they’ll pick up more of their content.

News aggregators in China carry whole stories without sending traffic back to the newspaper sites. But newspaper editors are proud to see their headlines posted on the homepages.

The president of a metropolitan morning paper once said he would love the portals to scoop up his content, if they gave credit to his journalists’ stories. Since last year his paper has downsized to a weekly.

But even without the Internet, many newspapers would not be able to survive, because they have never been able to produce differentiated content that makes their product unique and sustainable.

Portal managers say that in any middle-sized Chinese city, they see an average of four or five local newspapers producing similar mundane content, which makes them weak when bargaining with news aggregators.

So most newspapers will v ani sh. But if a news p a p e r produces unique and comp e l l i n g c o n t e n t a n d charges n e w s por tals, will it still be around in 10 or 20 years?

Or can a newspaper be saved if it expands and integrates its newsroom and online operations, forcing print-hardened journalists to be Internet-savvy?

It’s hard to know whether the Internet will kill off newspapers. But if a newspaper doesn’t provide good journalism, or continues to give away its content for free, or puts form before substance and quantity before quality, it will surely die sooner rather than later.

The Beijing News, popular with local high-end readers, once sued a news portal for damages of more than 3.7 million yuan ($541, 156), claiming the site had stolen its content, including 25,000 articles and pictures.

Although the sum settled was not made public, the case should give an idea about what newspapers could do with portals if they produce quality journalism.

A good newspaper might have more time to tap the potential of the Web and experiment with new print models.

If a newspaper hopes to stand out from a dozen or more competitors, it needs to provide essential coverage that differentiates itself from the pack and wins respect from readers. It won’t succeed by giving material away for free to aggregators.

The writer is a Beijing-based management consultant. Contact him via e-mail at dr.baiping@ gmail.com