Will the Chinese media survive? – the WTO-column

(Later also at Chinabiz)
“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.,” I wrote two weeks ago, focusing on the dramatic changes taking place in the non-Chinese media world.
But the Chinese media are doing pretty well, or not, asked some of my Chinese colleagues.

It is a legitimate question, since the Chinese media industry seems to expand very fast, quite unlike those in Europe and the Americas. Add spending has grown 25 percent last year, much faster than the economy did on average. Growing room to maneuver makes at least the print media much more interesting than a decade ago. The number of titles is growing very fast to such a degree that nobody is able to really follow the Chinese media scene. Competition between different media outlets is fiercer than ever. During the World Soccer tournament for the first time Chinese media sent out larger number of journalists to cover a global event. After the tsunami about hundred of them found themselves back in Indonesia and other country, for many journalists the first time on an international assignment to a disaster area.

A few of the media will survive and be real power brokers, as Benjamin Liebman indicated in the Columbia Law Review of January. When media maintain a solid link with the one-party state, like CCTV or the People’s Daily, they will be safe.
But the majority of media outlets has to survive on a market that has become in the past 18 months time as vicious as the market for TV-sets or cars. Some of the already established papers can still be wildly profitable, but many of the newcomers on the media market have not even a beginning of a clue how to make money. They often have financial solid backers, that might be able to keep on funding for some time, but a gruesome consolidation seems unavoidable. Despite the financial backing they sometimes have, the lack of resources, both financial and in human experience, makes it very tough for them to increase their standards very fast.
Especially in the fields where political control has diminished, competition is killing: technology, sport, finance and lifestyle. Already four daily papers claim to be the Wall Street Journal and I have lost count on how many want to be the New York Times of China. None of them can live up to those standards, because they still have to groom a new generation of journalists, struggle on crucial issues still with the censorship demands and seems mostly unable to convince a skeptical audience.
By the time they are able to deliver, the economic rational of the mass media might have diminished so fast because of the fast changing technology. That extra challenge, how to compete with the new ways to deliver news and information, might be too much for those emerging media.

Every media consumer has only 60 minutes to use in every hour, and those minutes are increasingly used to watch DVD’s, get their information and entertainment from the internet. Fast increasing revenues from ads might delay the inevitable downturn, but advertisers find new ways to spend their money others than on the traditional media very fast. Shanghai seems to have an LCD-screen on every free spot between elevators and in parks. The recent emergence of Craig-like websites for free classifieds is yet another sign also the Chinese media scene is heading for rough weather.

Of course the Chinese media will survive, but I’m nut sure whether they look like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. With a booming economy damage control is easier, but it needs pretty clever more that go further than just copying foreign examples.

Fons Tuinstra