Surviving media jungle at Internet age

As part of China Daily's aggressive strategy to boost its presence at home and abroad, METRO Beijing has just been relaunched with significantly more pages and reporting.

At a time when the news about papers is all doom and gloom half a world way, readers may be a little bewildered by the robust local media scene. With a resident foreign population of about 110,000, the city already publishes half a dozen English newspapers and magazines. There is a general consensus that in the West, newspapers' heyday is already over as they enter the decline phase of their product life cycle. But will newspapers in China be immune from the laws of media economics?

No, they won't. Some Chinese pundits have already forecast that due to an Internet-enabled freefall in readership and ad revenues, by 2025 market-driven newspapers will become an endangered species in China and only a very small number of "quality" newspapers will survive.