Can English print weeklies jump the trend

The six-month' anniversary of the newly establish Asia Weekly triggered off a few pieces - like here on Time's weblog - on the sustainability of this kind of operation. Asia Weekly, set up by the famous journalist Jasper Becker, now has a circulation of 20,000 and that certainly exceeds my expectations.

Asia Week had a circulation of 210,000 when it was closed in 2001 and the Far Eastern Economic Review 100,000 when it ended as a weekly. Retaining readers has been much easier than getting new ones in, but the Asia Weekly expects to have 50,000 in two years time. The magazine goes in more than one way against the current trend by for example having no substantial online presence.

I have been reading the magazine for a few months but decided not to subscribe. The news was at least one week old, I was mainly interested in their China-coverage and found that rather disappointing. It might have improved, but I cannot see it because they have no online presence. I did not see any of their articles being quoted by other media.

Now even the major newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have or will decide very soon to put all their content for free on the internet, not having a presence online seems a way to curtail the life cycle of the magazine. Beating the online flow on information is very hard and only by participating in the online conversation, media can make a difference. This era is about crumbling barriers. Putting yourself on a lonely island is a sure way into oblivion.

Can the Shanghai Media Group beat CNN?

The Shanghai Media Group (SMG) is planning to set up a 24-hours English news station to compete on a global market, reports Reuters. Since its major competitor CCTV has one in Beijing, Shanghai needs one too.
Could the Shanghai Media Group (or any other state-owned broadcasting station in China) compete on a global market. I'm not the most reliable expert in this field, since I have given up watching the boring nonsense on Chinese TV years ago.
But the Reuters dispatch offers a glimpse of what it needs to set up a new news station in China. The Shanghai Media Group has already been talking for a year to the local regulators. And what is next? Talking to the regulators in Beijing.

Although it has yet to receive final regulatory approval, Shanghai Media has already begun hiring English-speaking presenters, editors and reporters, including foreigners, for the new service, the sources said.

We will see. Or not, of course, since there are many more things to do than watching TV.

SCMP remains firmly behind a firewall

Chris Axberg, the editor in charge of the website of the South China Morning Post has left his job after a disagreement between management on the financial firewall the leading daily is maintaining, reports Shanghaiist.
Today the New York Times will remove the financial barriers (called TimesSelect) to read parts of its paper and - with the notable exception of the Wall Street Journal and parts of the Financial Times - financial firewalls are considered to be a nono for online publishing.

Axberg, who recently spearheaded SCMP’s relaunch of its online platform, confirmed his departure was effective from 28 September, bringing an end to an eight-year tenure with the company.
Sources indicated executive director, SCMP Group, Kuok Hui Kong was the front-runner to take the reins. Axberg said although he had advocated the SCMP’s online site becoming free for users with advertisers driving revenue, management had opted to retain a subscription-based model.

This is the verdict of online guru Jeff Jarvis on the move of the New York Times, but the same goes of course for the SCMP:

Bull. TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media, the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news and — more important — even as the internet revealed that the real value in media is not owning and controlling content or distribution but enabling conversation.

How to detect nonsense in articles on the Chinese internet

The Washington Post made a very sloppy article on this intriguing subject: how are the Chinese authorities going to control the internet and mobile communication? It started with a little anecdote that was new for me, but when I read this I knew I was losing my time:

It hasn't been for lack of trying. The Public Security Ministry, which monitors the Internet under guidance from the Central Propaganda Department, has recruited an estimated 30,000 people to snoop on electronic communications. The ministry recently introduced two cartoon characters -- a male and female in police uniforms -- that it said would pop up on computer screens occasionally to remind people that their activity is being tracked.

The urban myth of those 30,000 police officers monitoring the internet is the official benchmark that we are leaving serious journalism. The number has never even been proven and - it has been argumented before - on 162 million internet users that is actually a very low number. That number - if true - only proves China does not take controlling the internet very serious.
For the ministry of Public Security it might be news that they are under the guidance from the Central Propaganda Department. There is a committee of about 17 government departments who try to discuss how the government should deal with the internet, but none of those departments takes the overhand.
Of course, the cute cartoons - what a way to crack down on the internet users - were not introduced by the ministry, but by the Beijing public security. It is a very local affair, but Western media try to make small things big by declaring them wrongly into national issues.

SARFT-ban of today: sex

Sex sells, all media know and since being attractive is the last thing the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV (SARFT) want their Chinese media to be the regulator has banned sex, reports Josie Liu.

Prompted by some sex talk radio programs on several radio stations in Sichuan, China’s broadcast regulator has banned television and radio stations from planning, producing and broadcasting programs relating to sex life, experience or medicines.

China's media have always found ways around the rather conservative character of the regulator. In the 1990s you could listen all night long to call-in programs on the radio where people could ask expert advice om their sex problems. This was of course meant to be purely educational.

Now, sex is everywhere and the boys at Xinhua even have their own soft-porn departments. But that is print and SARFT will not allow that for "their" media. Not that the ban will help though, but since it is their job to ban thing, they will even ban the rain, when then think they should do it.

"The Standard" goes for a kill

The Standard, for ages the number two English language daily in Hong Kong, will be available for free from Monday, it announced today. The move is likely going to change the media landscape in Hong Kong.

The South China Morning Post has been a highly-profitable quasi-monopolist, relatively unhurt by the internet, although Hong Kong is one of the world's best wired places. But because of its relative small surface and good services, internet-based initiative, including media, did not make the impact it is making on the mainland.

With a mature free newspaper on the market, that is likely to change, especially in a city where sales are based on street vendors rather than subscriptions. The South China Morning Post has in the past decade mainly focused on cutting costs, since whatever quality they would deliver, there was anyway no competition. That might now change.

Free newspapers have a big impact wherever they show up. In Shanghai print readership in the subways is almost limited to the free paper that is handed out four days of the week.

Crushing the online conversation - Sam Flemming

Sam Flemming

Life at the internet in China has always been rather rough. With annually millions of youngster smelling the freedom of being able to say whatever they want, triggers off - next to very beautiful things - a lot of aggression too.

Originally they were called the "chatroom warriors", angry young men denouncing almost anything they would meet online, often becoming a nuisance for the more experienced users, looking for a decent discussions.

Sam Flemming now focuses in his latest entry at a the latest technological move of the chatroom warriers of today, the "Baidu Post Bar Crushing Machines". China's leading search engine Baidu has developed a tool that makes it really easy to start online discussions, but the latest technology has now developed a tool to crunch those discussions.

"Forum Crushing" refers to netizens using "Forum Crushing Machine" (爆吧机), a software designed to let users continuously post content with different IP address until the forum is overloaded and "crushed."

Sam Flemming warns:

For now, such "crushing machines" target mostly fan clubs sites. But don't be surprised if in the future it is brand related forums which are targeted. (Baidu Post Bar is filled with forums dedicated to such as this one for McDonald's. In this age, engaging consumers could result in a black eye.

Sam Flemming is also a speaker at Chinabiz Speakers. If you want to invite him for a speech, do let us know.

Kicking your reporters

The feature is unfortunately not that new. Reporters who belong to more powerfull publications get routinely beaten up when they show up, because local authorities fear they might be the subject of a fine piece of muckraking.

ESWN translates a first hand account of such a beating at the collapsed Fenghuang bridge that killed over 60 people.

At 11:30am on August 16, a People's Daily reporter together with a China Youth Daily reporter, a Southern Metropolis Daily reporter, an Economic Observer reporter and an Observe Orient Weekly reporter went to the Baiqing Hostel where the families of the victims of the Fenghuang bridge collapse were placed.
The family of Chen Jiaxiang from Lianyuan had five dead men, and the women and elders were crying with sorrow.

More at ESWN.

First official day at Chinabiz Speakers

t Today was the first official day of Chinabiz Speakers, the project that might pop up here every now and then. What makes this project special for me is that it also offers an opportunity to test some of the new-media techniques I have been reading, learning and talking about in a very practical way.
The morning began by sending off press releases to media outlets and through mailing lists of different Foreign Correspondents Clubs. The classic press release is more or less passe, but I do think it is for a lot of purposes useful to write up in one page what you are up to and where people can call you. Otherwise, sending off press releases to the old media was only a way to pay tribute to my old occupation, since I do not expect too much off it for our project.
We are - in terms of news - squeezed between 12 million recalled toys and a collapsed bridge. You have to know your place. But where in the past you could only hope somebody would still notice you, today a project like ours can follow the long tail. We do not have to be Harry Potter's to get things done.
Using your networks and relationships is key in the new-media toolkit, building up conversation with your different constituencies. Fortunately, the speakers' business is very much a people's business, even better, people who are supposed to bring in huge networks themselves.
Plan one was to get a core group of now slightly over 30 speakers on a closed mailing list to start forming a group. Some of the speakers do not each other, but some don't.
Plan one also failed, at least today, since the Google mailing lists have a quota of 30 people and by putting 31 on my list, I triggered off the Google spam alarm. My list was not activated and I seem to on a waiting list while a real human being looks at it.
Plan two was the mobilization of my own network. I had prepared emails to my friends and contacts that could be interested in the project and started to blast them off. What I first noticed was how many people are still on holidays: many out-of-office messages came back. What was further striking is the huge number of people who changed email addresses in the past two years. Then the Google spam guards hit again: after 500 emails they thought I should take a brake and they blocked my account for 24 hours. Fortunately, there is still Outlook.
Then we started to reactivate Chinabiz with a piece on KFC by one of our speakers Warren Liu. With over 20,000 subscribers interested in business in China Chinabiz is a network of itself and we are going to ask our speakers, if they are not yet one of our columnist, to join that stable of writers every now and then.
My digitally advanced friends suggested I should also start a group on Facebook. I did so, but this might not yet be the tool for the biggest part of my constituency. But in terms of networks, you can never have enough of them. In less than 24 hours, I have now already 26 members there!
That is very short my virtual marketing strategy for ChinaBiz Speakers. I will report now and then about the results.

Update: Ah, forgot to tell you that ChinaBiz Speakers has of course its own weblog. It focuses more on operational issues but shows also how the network is slowly getting into place. I think.

Who is reading the China Daily?

I'm not, not even their own editors read it, illlustrates ESWN with a nice screenshot, but somebody must have discovered this. The China Daily picked up a sentence from Reuters that would normally have been sanatized in a report on the Olympics:

"Security was tight around Tiananmen Square, where troops crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 with huge loss of life, as crowds gathered for the celebrations."

Of course, we cannot blame them for not reading their own propaganda, but it looks like somebody is going to shop wood for a while in one of the few forests taht have not yet been cut down.
More at ESWN.

Has Jongo.com a chance?

China Media News comes after earlier entries with more news about Jongo.com: the project I had already written off is said to continue with the support of the UK investors. Today's entry includes what I consider to be the funniest statement of the day:

The Managing Director of Jongo once said, "It takes a long time to build a portal, but once it's profitable, it is basically like printing money." Expect to see more of Jongo in the future, just not the near future.

It might explain a bit the lemming-like behavior of the UK investors who have until recently been pouring in 100,000 US dollars per month into the project. It shows such a lack of understanding how things have worked, work and will work in China that I can hardly set myself to the boring task of explaining all this.
First, the operation is illegal, a foreign entities are banned from having this kind of media organizations. There is nothing against being illegal in China, as long as you do not get noticed. And you cannot print money without being noticed.
The Chinese portals (who now have a potential customer base of over 160 million internet users in China, compared to maybe a few million who might be interested in and English language service) had a hard time. More than ten years after Sohu, Sina and others took off, things seem to be picking up for the first time. They have been under threat of being kicked off the Nasdaq more than once because they underperformed. The news market has certainly changed dramatically: there is no market for a web1.0 service like Jongo is offering.
You wonder what consultant has been making money on this project. I know Cam of the China Media News only arrived when it was all too late, but somebody has been giving dramatically wrong advises here.

Xinhua dives into citizens reporting

A citizen reports

The state news agency Xinhua as a nice go at the phenomena of "citizen reporting" and gives a fairly solid overview of the conundrums in the collaboration between unpaid volunteers and professional news organizations. They conveniently ignore that apart from grabbing a camera and getting footage for the traditional TV-stations, those citizens can also start their own broadcasting station for little costs. But otherwise it covers the main issues pretty well.

Cui Jianzhong, chief producer of DV Observation says, "Our citizen contributors mostly cover the stories happening around them from their own perspective, which is different from professional journalists, but closer to our audience."

Of course there is the odd bureaucrat who wonders where the world is going to when unlicensed citizen reporters roam around in China, but he is served off:

"There's no law saying that only the professional journalists can cover news. China's constitution guarantees every citizen's freedom of speech," says Guo Zhixin, legal counsel for DV Observation.

Well, that is good to hear and I will put the last quote apart for frequent usage in the future.

The ongoing demise of Jongo.com

Jongo back in April

Cam of China Media News, until May himself employed by jongo.com, details the further demise of what I would call an amazing misinvestment. Setting up a massive media investment through UK money - they have been spending 100,000 US dollars per month! - was already a big nono for everybody who is a little bit familiar with China.

Foreign media have a very hard time to find ground in China and only by avoiding calling yourself a media company, you might have a chance of surviving. Unless you become too big of course.
I walked in April by accident into their operation (that in itself says enough) and was wondering why they did not use the most obvious new media tools. They were trying to set up a new traditional media brand, as if nothing had changed in the media industry. You might hope that the investors learned their lesson, but I'm afraid they are now already busy finding other ways to lose money.

Trying to blackout an explosion

The Washington Post describes the efforts of local authorities to keep an explosion at Tian Shifu in Liaoning province under wraps. It is an excellent case study in how an explosion, costing at least 25 lives and problably much more, is kept out of the publicity.

In Beijing, officials in the central government of President Hu Jintao have suggested repeatedly that a more open attitude is necessary in the age of cellphones and the Internet. Wang Guoqing, vice minister of the government's national Information Office, told China Central Television last month that local attempts to block coverage of negative news are "naive" given the new technology.
Whether Wang was sincere or not in his call for more openness, the message has not gotten through in China's provincial propaganda offices. At those levels, senior propaganda officials often are on close terms with local newspaper and television editors; they attend the same party meetings and follow similar career paths. Coverage of Tian Shifu's explosion was a case in point.

The struggle for openness is an ongoing one. The story in the end made it into the Washington Post, but might not got a huge readership in Benxi county.

CCTV fires one third of work force

China Central TV might shed between 3,000 and 5,000 jobs or one third of its work force, summarizes China Media News in a round up of the rumors at China's central TV-station in Beijing.
The dismissals seem to focus on un-licensed journalists, temps and part-time university students in an effort to avoid future scandals like the news on the fake cardboard baozi's that embarrassed the broadcaster earlier.

Update: The China Digital Times comes with an interesting encore and looks for the cleanup at CCTV at the Labor Contract Law that will be in force next year:

Also following the baozi debacle reports say, central media authorities ordered CCTV to dump contractors and other freelance staff - some 2000 in all. CDT sources cite an another key motive for the staff cuts, however. In late June, the country passed its new Labor Contract Law, which comes into effect at the turn of 2008. CCTV, they’ve been told, has been maneuvering in recent weeks to comply. The law essentially forces employers to put contracts into writing within one month of employment, making it much trickier for them to hire temps. For an institutional work unit (事业单位) like CCTV, which has a limited number of staff positions and thousands more working informally, full compliance would appear quite the conundrum. Of course, as the sources acknowledged, the law could be just another excuse to clean house.

"China on TV" hits my screen

Nobody bothered to tell me, but since a few weeks we have a new English-language TV-channel about China on the internet: Chinaontv. This US-based initiative is a second, next to Tokyo-based ITV-Asia. (Disclosure: I'm currently discussing possible cooperation with ITV-Asia).
Compared to ITV-Asia Chinaontv seems to have a technically much more sophisticated operation. People who know me will realize that especially their RSS-page caught my attention: this is state of the art.
Both operations have their drawbacks: ITV-Asia seems more a podcast where the image does not add any value. Chinaontv has cute women readings texts in a professional TV-studio setting. Unfortunately, what they say is mostly no news and often outright boring: "Trade with France Up".
Both initiatives I cannot study very well, since in both bases playing the video's takes too much time. They might have to set up operations in China to solve those technical problems, exposing them to the regulatory drawbacks of China.

Yahoo! lied in Shi Tao's case

Shi Tao

Rconversation points at new material found by the Dui Hua foundation that proves Yahoo! legal counsel has been lying in a congressional hearing when he said that his company did not know why the judicial authorities in Beijing wanted to go after the journalist Shi Tao.
Shi was - with the help of Yahoo! - convicted to ten years of jail for giving state secrets to foreigners.
The Dui Hua foundation has translated the original document. Rconversations links to it all.

Update: The Dui Huai foundation comes with additional prove in other cases Yahoo knew why the police was after journalists and internet users.

Tough days for Li Changchun

Li Changchun

Propaganda Czar Li Changchun has a day-job in stifling debate. Coming from the Jiang Zemin school, that would have been an easy job, but if we can believe this report in the Washington Post, Li has been regularly at odds with his current boss, Hu Jintao.
The latest problem occurred when Li wanted to ban the July issue of the academic magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, because it carried an articles saying that the power monopoly of the Communist Party lays at the root of many of China's current problems:

Although Hu has generally shown a restrictive attitude toward free speech, he counseled tolerance this time, the report said, advising Li that it is healthier to have such debate out in the open than to let it ferment under the surface. The magazine remains on the stands.
The incident was only the latest in a string of setbacks for Li and China's propaganda bureaucracy. An explosion of negative news -- tainted food exports, slave labor at brick kilns, political challenges and even supposed cardboard dumplings -- has pained party censors and renewed demands for ideological and political discipline among China's journalists.

More at the Washington Post.

Print censor eyes online publications

Time for code orange as the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) announces it will try to regulate online publications. According to the China Tech News Kou Xiaowei, a deputy director of the print censor, his organization is preparing a system of approval and permission for online publications.
China's regulatory system for media is highly segmented and the different regulators one by one try to get involved in the online media, who are breaking down the traditional segmentation of the media. At the end of last year the State Administration of Radio, TV and Film (SARFT) tried to get hold on the video sharing market, but basically got nowhere, at the time.
When the regulators are fighting to hold or even expand their turf they are up for a fight with colleague censors, the industry and the audiences, who increasingly turn to the internet. My prediction is that GAPP will not get very far, but might still be out to kill some chickens to scare off the monkeys, as the Chinese saying goes.

Killing Dragon TV news

Just heard a story of an incident that happened two weeks ago while I was in Europe, but is rather telling for the current media relations in China. Dragon TV of the Shanghai Media Groups has been competing successfully with the national news of CCTV at seven o'clock. Traditionally all Chinese watch the news at seven.
The news of Dragon TV was broadcasted from 6:30 to 7:30 and was doing very well, because it was unlike the CCTV propaganda show more like a news program. Last year it won a prize as the best news program in China. But two weeks ago Shanghai's new party chief forced the Shanghai Media Group to toe the old line. Since then Shanghainese can enjoy each day at seven the national news. The Dragon news program has been killed.
Of course, this step caused quite some bad feelings at the Shanghai Media Group and was widely discussed on the internet. But as always: politics does prevail.
None of the official media was allowed to publish about the incident and - even more remarkable - non of the foreign media actually noticed it.

The lagging online ad market, more

Kaiser at Ogilvy reports about a meeting he had with 50 Tsinghua EMBA-students, all senior executives of Chinese companies. He asked them about their explanation for the fact that consumers spend a huge percentage of their time online, while ad companies keep on pouring most of their marketing budgets into TV-stations.

The answers were intriguing, honest, and often very funny: One gentleman basically said that at least in China, people in a position to determine ad spend spend all their days actually running their businesses, and their evenings getting drunk at Karaoke parlors, and they can’t be bothered with learning about the Internet. Others said that marketing decision-makers extrapolate from their own Internet use, which is very purpose-driven: they hunt for specific bits of information and never bother to look at ads. Most boiled down to “it’s a generational thing,” and everyone was confident that the gap will close.

Citizen journalism takes off at QQ

the Jinan-page at qq.com

The China Media Project points at a first experiment at Tencent's QQ in mobilizing citizen reporters. On July 18 Jinan was hit by a devastating flood that killed 26. At QQ of Shenzhen-based Tencent editors asked for input of their users:

how is it we have only this frosty [unfeeling] information about "26 dead", 6 missing and 171 injured? We want to know how those deceased passed away, and why ... ( in a translation by the China Media project)

In a few hours time, the dedicated webpage was flooded with material from local citizens, hinting a a failing local government:

Yesterday, the water flooded into our house. Our house is on the first floor. We were just sitting down to eat. Dad went off right away to find sand to fill up bags, but the water came too fast and washed the bags away. It looked like a dam had burst, and the water was putrid. Today Dad's busy building up the threshold. It's too thin and needs to be replaced. No one cares. Our government is just busy making money.

QQ is a highly successful internet service provider, belonging to the top-3 internet companies in terms of traffic and organizing a large portion of the now 162 million internet users in China. Because of that position they are very well positioned to experiment with this kind of citizen journalism and are likely to follow up after this initial success. Citizen journalism is here to stay, how to organize it, that is the question. Officially internet portals can only republish news that has been already in one of the censored traditional media, but this new feature could mean a diversion from those old restraints, if the regulators take it easy.

Update: Global Voices has a thorough overview of all the citizen reporting in China concering the floodings. Nice pictures too.

The South China Morning Post still does not get it

I just got the kind invitation from the publisher of the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post for a three-month free subscription on their website. He flatters a bit my weblog, but unfortunately illustrate to have no clue how these new media work.
Basically the paper remains behind a firewall and lifting it for me for three months does not help me to use one of the most important features of the new media: the link. As long as I cannot link to them, why should I actually bother to spend my time reading their paper or even pay for it?
The South China Morning Post has decided not to become part of the ongoing debate I'm happy to belong to. As others have said, survival is not mandatory.

Update: Danny Levinson builds further on the case on the poor performance of the traditional media going online in "Dow Jones gets what it deserves in Murdoch".

Can we believe news in the China Daily?

The issue if we can believe the news in the China Daily - or for that matter the Shanghai Daily - has come up in the past few weeks here in Europe more than once. Because the quality of the English language daily has gone up (well, it could not get worse from where it was at the beginning of the 1990s), quotes regularly also Western newswires and is reversely also increasingly quoted as a reliable source in Western media. It is now also online available, so more than once media outside China are inclined to use it as a source.

I think that is still a mistake: both are state-owned media and all they say fits the agenda of the government. So, it does not mean what they write is always wrong, it only means that on crucial moments you just cannot believe them.

How should we look for example at this article, reporting about the progress the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) in its fight against the rampant pollution? The article is even sourced from Associated Press. I think we can safely assume that SEPA indeed has issued such a statement. But what does it really mean? Very little, according to me.

SEPA is a rather powerless institution that has mainly some leverage on central level, but the English language media in China will never be able to say just that. Whether on a local level factories really have been closed is not that certain, and even less certain is whether they have not opened again after the inspectors have left the site again.

Most of the rest of the article consists of well-intended promises that might or might not be delivered. In most cases this is propaganda is being pumped around and the fact that also AP is part of that system does not really increase the trustworthiness.

For a nice inside view, do read this blog Positive Solutions, by a British copy-editor of the China Daily, who has unfortunately left his post recently. The China Daily can only be believed when it reports negative news about China, and even then you need to be alert for possible twists.

Dear Policeman Kang

Nick Young of the China Development Brief has - after the closure of the Chinese edition of his leading publication - published a statement and a letter he wrote to investigating police officer Kang. (In full here - courtesy of the WSJ).
Of course, policeman Kang probably does not care less, since it is for him an illegal operation. But it show a bit what kind of trouble he is heading for, when he or his superiors decide to push ahead with the closure.
The letter includes a list of organizations who have supported the newsletter:
Oxfam Hong Kong, Save the Children UK, The Worldwide Fund for Nature, The Ford Foundation, The Trace Foundation, The Kadoorie Charitable Foundation, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Great Britain-China Centre, The Japan Foundation, ActionAid, The British Council, The Canadian International Development Agency Civil Society Program, The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office Human Rights Project Fund, The Australian International Development Agency, The Charities Aid Foundation (UK), The European Union Beijing Delegation, CARE International; Voluntary Service Overseas, Save the Children UK, The International Fund for Agricultural Development, The United Kingdom Department for International Development, The University of Harvard Centre for Global Equity, JP Morgan Bank, HPBilliton

China Development Brief ordered to close

Authorities in Beijing have ordered the leading publication on NGO-activities in China, the China Development Brief, to close its Chinese edition. reports Time at its blog.

Nick Young, founder of the publication that has been around since 1996, keeps hope:

"My hope is that these actions have been precipitated by zealous security officers," he says, "and that more senior figures in the government and Communist Party will realize that actions of this kind are not in China's best interest."

The publication was, according to the local security officials both "illegal" and conducting "illegal surveys". The closure, last week, comes at a time when China seems busy in trying to control non-governmental activities by foreigners, one year ahead of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Earlier a US group also accused China of deporting over one hundred foreign missionaries from China.

While those acts are obvious going to be an embarrassment for the central government, zealous local official might have their own interpretation of what is needed in the country.

Nick Young remains faces a 5-year ban from China, but remains optimistic for the time being:

One irony of the moves against the publication is that the China Development Brief, whose motto is "to enhance constructive engagement between China and the world," has editorialized against what Young describes as "more or less openly hostile" Western criticism of China. "I do consider myself to be friend of China," he says. "I think it's a serious problem if the state cannot distinguish between friends and enemies."

Update: I just learned from a press release that the servers of this online publication are based in the UK, making it - if it has any nationality - a British publication that should adhere to British laws and regulations. When the authorities have any misgivings about an online publication, they can block it.
That is most likely why Public Security in Beijing got the local statistics bureau involved and included "illegal surveys" as another offense. I'm not sure how much meat is on that one. Anyway, even if the accusation by the Beijing authorities are illegal, it would not make the life of Nick Young much happier.

Upcoming: online ad revenue

I'm preparing a new media training I will be giving next week in Shanghai. The sluggish online ad market has been passing by at this weblog more than once. So, it is nice to report some positive trends that have been showing up at my radar screen during the preparation.
First, last year the online market was according to ACNielsen/Netratings between four and five billion Renminbi worth. They only started to measure online activities last year, explaining why the real interesting figures will only show up this year.
While the figure is still small compared to the always leading TV ads (25.6 billion Rmb over 2006) it had already passed the ad revenue stream going to the magazine market (3.1 billion Renminbi), according to again ACNielsen.
What is really interesting are their figures about the first quarter of 2007. The online ads are good for 1.4 billion Renminbi, an increase of 40 percent. Leading is Baidu, holding 21% of the market, followed by Sina (19%). Those figures are for sure encouraging.
What the online media need is more creativity to make it worthwhile for the advertisers. Like here what happened for a French internet provider. Really well done.

China Daily starts to see Buddha's

Only this morning I explained a Belgium colleague, who relied for his China information too much on the China Daily, that what he was reading was basically the political line of the central government, how critical those articles could be nowadays. And now this (h/t Shanghiist).

It brought back some fine memories on a investigative trip I made in the 1980s as a journalist to Ballinspittle, Ireland where the faithful (of the Catholic denomination) gathered to watch a moving Mary statue.
I wrote down the statements of those - I thought - pretty silly people who had all kinds of explanations for the reasons behind the movements of the virgin Mary. Some, with tears in their eyes, admitted they had not yet seen the statue move and vowed to stay on until they say it happen.
My journalistic work and job as an amateur psychologist then got a nasty twist as I saw the statue move myself. With my friend and photographer Jan Banning we have spent the rest of our stay in Ireland to find an explanation, we never found.
The China Daily still sounds a bit sceptical, but they can see it too.

Modern missionaries - the WTO-colum

(later in Chinabiz)

What have media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and US trade union leader Any Stern in common? Both of them came to China with a mission, and both have seen some - but it limited - successes. Murdoch wanted to introduce modern media to China, Stern wanted to help the Chinese trade union to organize Wal-Mart and maybe more. In both cases the question is: what will happen to their heritage when they have obtained Chinese characteristics?

China has a pretty mixed reputation when it concerns receiving foreign guests. Early Jesuits were gladly offered a place to stay in Beijing, but in the 19th century the heads of foreign missionaries occasionally were chopped off. Both gentlemen seem to fit excellent in that missionary tradition that has dominated the relations between China and the rest of the world for centuries. Mr. Murdoch came closest in getting his head chopped off, at least in the early 1990s when he denounced authoritarian governments like that in Beijing. Those days are long forgotten and after some years of unease, Mr. Murdoch became good friends with those same people he sought to overthrow earlier in his life.

What Stern and Murdoch have in common with the earlier generations of missionaries is that making money is not topping their agenda, but more a more ideological drive is bringing both to China. Mr. Stern is educating China's trade union in grass root organization skills, skills they first applied last year when they organized the US retailer Wal-Mart. In the end a better-organized trade union in China might help to raise the Chinese wages and that might indirectly be beneficial for Mr. Stern's members back in the US, but that seems a target for the long haul. Most business people are more driven by quarterly figures and that makes them rather different from the missionaries, modern or old.

Mr. Murdoch is equally in the media business for the very long haul, if any, as he has discovered the hard way. While much of his efforts to educated the state-owned news media had been gratefully accepted, earning money himself has - possibly forced by the difficult circumstances for foreign media to work in China - obtained a lower position on his agenda too. Each of his media projects in China was seen as a sure winner but invariably ran into problems with backstabbing regulators, lackluster attention from the consumers or a combination of both. The recent launch of his elsewhere successfully social network MySpace has not been the instant success in China it was expected to be.

What both gentlemen have in common with the earlier generations of missionaries are their sky-high expectations on how they can change China. Changing China was high on the agenda of missionaries, as it seems to be on the agenda of Stern and Murdoch. Both work in industries that are heavily dominated by government-driven political agenda's and in both cases it looks very unlikely they might even make a dent in China's spurt forward. At best China will reuse some of the tools they offer and use it for their own purposes. They might leave behind some nice churches and maybe that is rewarding enough.

The illusion of being able to make a change in China keeps the missionaries running and makes them sometimes admirable people. It does not mean they will be successful.

Fons Tuinstra

Foreign correspondents increasingly source from weblogs

Foreign correspondents covering China rely increasingly on weblogs, writes Rebecca MacKinnon, assista