Required reading – The WTO-column

The Nike-add
(later also at Chinabiz)

Shanghai – The other night I attended a cocktail party at the home of Jochem Haakma, the Dutch consul general in Shanghai and – among very many other people – I bumped into Jonathan Wilshere, director of the Shanghai Business Review, one of the many free give-away print publications that have a booming business here in Shanghai.
We were very much each others opposite in taking in information. Wilshere said he had not time to read all that stuff on the internet, and wondered who would have time to do that anyway. He was, as we bloggers call it, very much past century.
I would literally not make my hands dirty on any print publication, including the free ones. I would be scanning the news only on the internet, mainly by using an RSS-reader with around one hundred websites and weblogs subscribed, while only going to, say four or five publications that have not yet an RSS-feed.
What we are seeing is a Teutonic shift in how people get their information and when media, companies, governments and pr-agencies do not get it by now, they might be losing out.

When I started to visit Asia at the beginning of the 1990s I was already reading the Far Eastern Economic Review. In China very soon the South China Morning Post and Asiaweek became part of my diet of compulsory reading. When you would not read those three publications, you did not know what was going on and what people were talking about. Even though you would get them in China days too late and against a heavy surcharge, you did put up with that.
Those three publications have or disappeared or made themselves otherwise oblivious. The South China Morning Post I would read when I’m in Hong Kong, because it is a great local paper, but here in China it is no longer compulsory reading. I have not seen the paper in years because it is not online for free available and from the very few references of other media make to the Post I deduct that I’m missing very little.
This is not a unique Asia phenomenon. The media industry in the US will hold very soon a discussion the “the vanishing newspaper”. When I described last year for the Nieman Report of Harvard University how the changes in the media would change foreign correspondence and have affected the role of the classic foreign correspondent, I still thought that flagships like the New York Times would be an exception on this general downward trend. Now I’m not that sure anymore.
Orville Schell, the dean of the journalism school at UC Berkeley and always good for a nice metaphor, compared in January in Business Week the demise of the traditional media industry with the fall of the Roman Empire, where a powerful conglomerate was replaced by small warring states, the bloggers, who did not give birth to another empire for centuries. Mass media are over, while niche markets take the lead.

There are early signs that the influence of the internet in China is going to be as seismic as it is in the United States, where high-profile media figures at CBS and CNN were brought down, not because they were necessarily wrong, but because these institutions of a past century had no clue how to defend themselves against the attacks on the internet. In China Nike was the last foreign company to feel the heat of the internet when they pulled an innocent commercial around Christmas and apologized for insulting Chinese dignity after a lynch mob occurred at the internet. They were not the first and will not be the last to be hit by the Chinese chatroom warriors. Jonathan Wilshere might not have time to get his information from the internet, when foreign companies have to make time to find out what is going on it might be too late.

Fons Tuinstra