Chinese newspapers' responses to the impact of digital media

The crisis of the newspaper press in the developed world is extremely well known. A combination of declining circulation and the flight of advertising to the internet has had a greater or lesser impact on the revenues, and thus on the journalism, of newspapers in many countries, and particularly in the USA. Up until very recently, the countries of the developing world, including China, have been widely regarded as immune to these problems: circulation was rising and advertising revenues were expanding. In the case of China, at least, this period of expansion in audiences and revenues has come to an end and newspapers have been struggling to adapt to the new situation. Some of the strategies are the same as those prevalent in the west -- cutting costs through economising on staff, more efficient use of material resources and moving from expensive offices to cheaper locations are familiar ways in which newspapers everywhere have responded to falling revenues. The press in China, however, has a different structure to that of newspapers in the developed world. This structure, determined by political factors, means that some familiar western strategies cannot be transported to China. It is not, for example, possible to merge titles for purely commercial reasons nor to sell them to rich individuals. On the other hand, the government has taken a much more interventionist stance in pushing newspapers to adapt to the new environment. A range of schemes have been set up designed to help newspapers develop new business models to replace the loss of advertising revenues and a variety of strategies are currently being tested. For many newspapers, particularly those “commercial” papers that have prospered in the last thirty years, the prime motivation has been economic: they have adopted very aggressive commercial stances, developing online shopping portals for example, aimed at replacing advertising revenue with transactional revenue. For the “party” papers, however, the main motive has been ideological. They are adopting a number of strategies in order to retain existing readers while reaching out to new social groups via new media, notably through mobile media. This paper reports on the current difficulties of the Chinese press and analyses some of the strategic responses made by commercial and party newspapers.