Shanghai Street View: Nebulous Newspapers
Another one bites the dust.
That was my first reaction on reading a thinly sourced report on news portal Sina that Shanghai’s somewhat cerebral Oriental Morning Post was planning to cease publication on January 1 next year. I made some of enquiries of my own, and it seems the Sina report may have been a bit premature. But it does appear that plans are indeed in the works to shutter this venerable institution of Shanghai’s media scene.
I use the phrase “venerable institution” somewhat facetiously, since Oriental Morning Post, also known by its Chinese name Dongfang Zaobao, is only a 13-year-old newspaper. That kind of brief history is tiny when compared with more familiar names like the New York Times and Washington Post, which all trace back their histories more than a century to the rise of Western newssheets.
But that’s the reality in hyperactive China, a land where trends that would normally take decades in the west often get compressed into the space of just a year or two. Western newspapers have been in decline for nearly two decades now, as nimbler new media formats offer far more focused audiences and younger readers for advertisers.
That was hardly the case in China, however, where papers like Oriental Morning Post were thriving when I first came to Shanghai in 2011. Fast forward to the present, when nearly all the papers and even Shanghai’s venerable TV station are reportedly losing money as young readers and viewers abandon them in droves for trendier online options like Sina and Youku, China’s equivalent of YouTube.
The headlines that caught everyone’s attention traced their source to an official WeChat account belonging to an entity called Shanghai No 1, saying that managers had decided to formally stop publishing Oriental Morning Post at the start of next year. All of the paper’s staff would be transferred to the Post’s new media sister outfit, ThePaper, which operates a popular app and has no print edition.
No one from my broader media circles was buzzing about the news, so I checked with a couple of contacts more closely tied to the newspaper. One confirmed that senior managers are saying a closure is coming, though it appears no concrete timetable has been determined yet.
This particular closure, if and when it happens, certainly won’t surprise anyone, least of all myself. My contacts inside the company say Oriental Morning Post has been gradually transferring many of its reporters to ThePaper over the last couple of years, as part of an effort to remain relevant in the new media age.
My own experience with newspapers here in China reflect the broader situation. I’ve previously written about the decline of Shanghai’s traditional red-colored newsstands, and how one owner told me I was her youngest customer, even though I’m hardly so young at 52.
Better Online Options
I personally used to be a regular reader of Oriental Morning Post, but stopped following it a few years ago due to better online options. On a recent Sunday morning I bought a copy to read with my morning coffee, only to discover the Sunday edition had been reduced to a simple pre-written cultural section dominated by book reviews.
On reading about reports of the closure plans, I stopped by another newsstand near my home this week and picked up the latest edition, which was a meager 24 pages long. The newsstand’s owner said he had also read the reports of the paper’s imminent closure, and repeated the refrain about how bad business had become over the last two years.
Oriental Morning Post’s relatively late arrival to Shanghai was part of a broader wave of similar newspaper openings, as China’s stodgier older newspapers tried to launch more commercial publications. Somewhat ironically, many of those younger newspapers were launched in the opening years of the 21st century, just when the Internet was starting to pose a serious threat to much older newspapers in the west. China’s Internet at that time was far less advanced, and the number of Chinese with Internet access was also a tiny fraction of today’s levels.
But it was really inevitable that the trend would catch up with the Chinese newspapers sooner or later, and that’s what has happened. What’s most fascinating for me, as an industry watcher, is the incredibly fast way it has happened here in Shanghai, with much of the rapid decline happening over just the last two years.
As I’ve said in the past, change is inevitable at the end of the day, and nobody will probably be too surprised by Oriental Morning Post’s looming closure. But one of my friends once pointed out that the rapid rate of change in China can sometimes be a bit unsettling, leading to feelings of loss when companies with even just 10 or 15 years of history suddenly close up forever.
