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China Exclusive: Friends or foes, newspaper rivals unite against digital threat

Xinhua, August 26, 2016 Adjust font size:

In what is sometimes a cut-throat industry, it is rare to see two print media publications get into bed together, but that may be about to change.

Facing fierce competition from digital media, two Chinese newspapers, who have long been rivals, have given up their front pages to drum up subscribers for each other

Readers of the Ji'nan Times, a local newspaper in Ji'nan, Shandong Province, were startled to pick up the newspaper on Thursday morning to find the entire front page devoted to an advertisement that read "Welcome, Subscribe to the Qilu Evening News in 2017."

Similarly, the front page of the Ji'nan edition of the Qilu Evening News was an advertisement for the Ji'nan Times. The move raised eyebrows of the newspapers' respective readers, and pictures of the two front pages were widely circulated on China's social media.

Sun Bin, a reader of Qilu Evening News, was surprised by the move.

"It was weird when I saw today's newspaper. This kind of cooperation is very rare to see."

Zhang Tianwei, general manager of Qilu Evening News, said that it had become necessary for traditional media to cooperate with each other in face of the challenge posed by online media.

Numbers of newspaper copies in China decreased 7.3 percent in 2015 from a year ago, with page numbers decreasing 19.1 percent, according to a State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television report. Over the same period, revenues fell 10.3 percent and profits dropped 53.2 percent.

Thirty-one newspaper groups suffered loss from their main business in 2015. Only 17 reported a loss in 2014.

"Newspapers are losing both subscribers and advertisers," said Zhao Zhiguo, chief editor of Jinan Times. Internet media and social media are having a great impact on print media, he said

China had 688 million Internet users by the end of 2015, with an Internet penetration rate of 50.3 percent, according to statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center. Among Internet users, 90.1 percent used mobile phones to connect to the Internet.

New media is rapidly taking hold of the market. Chinese Internet company Tencent, owner of social media platform Wechat, saw its online advertising revenue surge by 110 percent in 2015, reaching 17.5 billion yuan (2.6 billion U. S. dollars).

"The two newspapers have been competing with each other in news and advertizing but now is the time to unite," Zhao said.

Besides cooperating, the two newspapers also launched new online platforms in order to gain a wider readership.

"It is important to learn from new media to innovate our reporting model. At the same time, we firmly believe that our print media will continue to have its market share, with high-quality and in-depth reporting," Zhao said. Endi