If you're a frequent customer of street newsstands in big Chinese cities, you may have already noticed an intriguing phenomenon: Daily newspapers are competing for space with tabloid-sized digest publications that collect published articles mostly from print media.
In Beijing, on the shelves of dusty and cramped corner kiosks, readers will find as many digest papers, if not more, displayed alongside dailies. Some stands carry several metropolitan and national newspapers, but stock a dozen digest papers published by newspaper companies across the country. It's reported that general-interest digest papers all have six or seven-figure circulations nationwide, which has attracted more newspapers to venture into the business.
I am a faithful reader of two digest papers. Except on overseas trips, I've not missed a single issue of Reference from Books and Periodicals that is edited in Xi'an in Northwest China, which boasts a distribution network of 168 Chinese cities. The other one is the Beijing-based Writer's Digest that provides a mix of political, cultural and social stories. Both are published twice a week. The owner of the kiosk near my workplace will start digging out the papers every time she sees me approach from across the street. Do I buy Chinese daily newspapers? No, I read them on the Web, when I am prompted by interesting headlines on my smartphone.
Besides low production costs, the recipe for the success of the digest papers may be their focus on red-hot social issues, their mix of interesting anecdotes and information related to present problems, and a flair for finding "irrelevant" stories that make the reading experience easier and more enjoyable.
Although it seems counter-intuitive for digest papers to compete for eyeballs on the strength of reporting, they have an advantage as they can sift through a myriad of homogeneous reports and present only the best of others' work. The carefully selected and edited stories save time and costs for busy readers wanting to keep up with current affairs. In a typical issue, the lead articles are standard fare, covering topics like housing prices, the shortage of labor, food safety, welfare for pensioners, corruption and other crimes, the type of stories that touch the national nerve.
The digest papers also devote significant space to historic people, events and places. In a recent issue, Reference from Books and Periodicals featured a front-page story on how a Chinese emperor in the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) achieved social harmony through improving his subjects' livelihoods. Days earlier, the Writer's Digest ran a story on the elite British school Harrow School, explaining why the rich and powerful would send their boys there.
Light stories are actually an old trick of newspaper editors. The American management guru Peter Drucker, who was a journalist in his younger years, once marveled at the "amazingly high readership and retention" of these irrelevant or incidental short articles that are used to "balance" a page. He wrote that these "fillers" are remembered far better than almost anything else in the daily paper, because they make no demands on readers.
In digest papers, these "little tidbits of irrelevancy", as Drucker described them, have become longer and fuller. But who doesn't want to know why Chinese address a father-in-law as "Tai Mountain"? Or that European billionaires throw truffle parties where celebrities need to donate to charities to attend?
Some pundits have 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.
We cannot tell what's to become of digest papers as their parents falter. Perhaps the most successful ones will try to tap the Web potential more and metamorphose into a more sustainable publishing business. Whatever is to happen, the rise of the digest papers has given new hopes to the ancient trade.
The writer is editor-at-large of China Daily. He can be reached via email: dr.baiping@gmail.com
(China Daily 06/02/2012 page5)
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