Sixteen Years: The Birth and Death of a Broadsheet Dream | QDaily Business History

A technological revolution, a shift in who holds the microphone, and ever-tighter controls seized this industry by the throat all at once.

Jian Guangzhou's office is bare. A computer and a telephone sit on the huge desk. The bookcase behind him holds no books — just 12 certificates and two trophies, lined up neatly.

"All from my reporting days."

Jian spent more than a decade as a reporter. He is now general manager and a partner at Shanghai Zhuangling Culture Communication, a PR firm founded in 2010. Most of its partners came out of the press, like him — Caijing, Southern Weekly, Southern Metropolis Daily, 21st Century Business Herald, New Express, China Business News, every name a famous one.

There are no dairy companies on the client list. A few have approached the firm, Jian says, but none became a client. He makes a point of this because of the story that made him a public figure: "14 Infants in Gansu Diagnosed With Kidney Disease, Suspected Link to Sanlu Infant Formula," published on page A20 of the Oriental Morning Post on September 11, 2008. It was the first report to name Sanlu, and it touched off a food-safety scandal that shook the country.

That story made the Oriental Morning Post one of Southern Weekly's Media of the Year for 2008. Until then, the paper — which prized influence above all else — had been influential mostly in Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta, with a few special sections well regarded among intellectuals. After it, the Oriental Morning Post finally looked like the broadsheet it had always wanted to be.

Jian collected honors official and unofficial, including a Shanghai May Day Labor Medal; they sit on the shelf behind him now. Anyone who remembers how hard that scandal hit the dairy industry can see why Jian is careful about which companies he works with.

About four years after the story, Jian left the Oriental Morning Post. Four years after that, on December 31, 2016, the paper published its last issue.

(I)

Fourteen years earlier, in the second half of 2002, Xu Jun, a night editor at Wenhui Daily, was planning to go work for Shen Hao. Shen then ran 21st Century Business Herald, and the 21st Century group of papers was already taking shape — a sub-group of Southern Media Group (originally Southern Daily Press Group, renamed in 2005), which also owned Southern Weekly and Southern Metropolis Daily. Shen, in his early thirties, was riding high: he joined Southern Weekly at 21 and later ran its news desk, became executive deputy editor-in-chief of City Pictorial at 27, and at 28 founded 21st Century Business Herald with colleagues.

The paper Xu meant to join was 21st Century World Herald, shut down in March 2003 over a story it ran. What kept him at Wenhui Daily in the end was that Southern Media Group was trying to start a new paper together with Wenhui-Xinmin United Press Group — with Shen Hao leading the effort. Wenhui Daily belonged to Wenhui-Xinmin United Press Group at the time; that group merged with Jiefang Daily Press Group in 2013 to form Shanghai United Media Group.

In the first half of 2003, Xu formally joined the Oriental Morning Post, still in preparation, as assistant to the editor-in-chief. He reported to Qiu Bing, his old colleague from Wenhui Daily and the new paper's editor-in-chief.

"As I remember it, we were in what's now Xinmin Evening News's old building, No. 839 Middle Yan'an Road. The building was run-down, and we dug up some beat-up desks from who knows where. Twenty or thirty of us started the prep work. Shen Hao came up from Guangzhou often to talk things over and hold meetings."

In Xu's memory, Shen had The New York Times constantly on his lips. Xu ran a section of Shanghai local news called "Metropolitan News." "Shen named it — he had a copy of The New York Times with him, the Metro section." Translated literally, Metro became "Metropolitan."

At about the same time, a group in Beijing had its eye on The New York Times too. They first wanted to call the paper Beijing Times outright, with a slogan eerily close to the Times's own: "Responsible for Reporting Everything." After some back-and-forth, it became The Beijing News.

The Beijing News was a formal partnership between Southern Media Group and Guangming Daily Press Group — "an organized, institutional undertaking; more than 200 core staff came mostly from Southern Metropolis Daily, under Southern Media Group," Han Wenqian said.

Han was one of those who moved north from Southern Metropolis Daily to join The Beijing News. There he was general manager, in charge of advertising.

Print was still in its golden age, and Han broke a record fast: 3 million yuan in advertising in The Beijing News's first issue, a measure of how much advertisers believed in the new paper. It ran 72 pages a day — "the most in China, along with Southern Metropolis." By the time Han left in 2007, the newsroom had 600 people; counting the business side, "more than 2,000 — unimaginable for a newspaper today."

"Born already in its prime," co-founder Cheng Yizhong wrote in The Beijing News's founding editorial. Cheng had been editor-in-chief of Southern Metropolis Daily; in 2003 he and that paper's then deputy editor-in-chief, Yang Bin, led more than 160 people north to Beijing to start the new one.

By some accounts, Cheng also called The Beijing News "a towering tree we've planted, not a seedling you can stamp out with one kick." In the founding editorial he wrote: "Through the work of generations of newspapermen, The Beijing News will surely become the most influential newspaper in 21st-century China, the most responsible newspaper in 21st-century China, a newspaper worthy of a great nation, a newspaper that carries the hopes and dreams of China's journalists."

The same fierce idealism, the same swagger. The Beijing News wanted to be a "new kind of metro paper covering politics and current affairs" that "matched the standing of the capital." The Oriental Morning Post took the large New York Times format outright and set out to make a paper "with its own views and a character of its own."

(II)

This was where the press had been heading. After 2000, a new kind of city paper began to form — grown out of the citizen-facing metro paper, but aimed at a more upmarket, or middle-class, reader. A group of media people set out, deliberately, to build "great newspapers."

Han Wenqian, who entered the business in 1993, puts the golden age of China's metro papers at 1995 to 2005.

West China Metropolis Daily launched in 1995 and became the model for the form: citizen news, the everyday and social stories closest to readers' lives. Southern Metropolis Daily followed in 1997, going after contentious social issues and circulating across the Pearl River Delta.

After 2001, Southern Metropolis Daily drew notice with its reporting on the suspected fraud at Shenzhen's ABA company and a series on the remaking of the Shenzhen special economic zone. In 2003, "The Death of Detainee Sun Zhigang," on the custody-and-repatriation system, took it to its peak. The story of a young man from Hubei who died unexpectedly in a custody center drew such public attention that the Measures for the Custody and Repatriation of Urban Vagrants and Beggars were abolished that same year.

Advertising was rising at the same time. By the end of 2000, Southern Metropolis Daily's ad revenue had reached 260 million yuan; by the first half of 2003, Southern Metropolis Daily's ad revenue reportedly reached 510 million yuan, with circulation above 1.4 million copies and 88 pages a day on average.

Southern Metropolis Daily's success showed Beijing and Shanghai, both full of media talent of their own, that there was an opening here.

The Beijing News aimed at the people living in the capital who were "well educated, broad in outlook, both tolerant of culture and alert to it," while the Oriental Morning Post cast itself as "a newspaper for the middle class." Both wanted to offer a better product.

Few worried much about the future then. The opposite: they were full of confidence. Xu still remembers the look on Qiu Bing's face when he said he wanted to "run a great newspaper that lasts a hundred years" — a boast the equal of Cheng Yizhong's "the most influential newspaper in 21st-century China."

(III)

"We caught the tail end of the last wave in newspapers," said Zhao Yang, who joined the Oriental Morning Post in 2003 and worked on both its editorial and business sides.

The industry had reached maturity, and advertising showed it. According to figures cited by Lin Hui, head of the economic journalism department at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, from a book on China's media industry titled Eyeballs Rule (《眼球为王》), Chinese newspaper ad revenue grew from 677 million yuan in 1990 to 24.301 billion yuan in 2003 — 35.9 times over in 14 years. The growth continued past 2003, until it turned after 2012.

Figures the ad-tracking database Meihua.info provided to QDaily show that from 2003 to 2006 — the three years after the Oriental Morning Post and The Beijing News launched — total rate-card billings for Chinese newspapers grew from 18.26 billion yuan to 36.61 billion yuan. (The rate card is the page price a paper quotes publicly; what advertisers actually pay includes a discount.)

Real estate propped up most newspaper advertising in those years, contributing about 13% of it annually. Behind every successful metro paper stood a crowd of property developers — or, put another way, a good cycle. Developers liked buying pages in metro papers, and while the bubble kept swelling they had no trouble selling anything.

Retailers, home-appliance superstores, carmakers and luxury brands followed them into print.

In 2005, The Beijing News's rate-card ad revenue hit 460 million yuan, passing its rival at the time, The Beijing Times. The two fought it out for the next five or six years. From 2008 The Beijing Times pulled ahead again, until 2011, when The Beijing News retook the lead with 1.27 billion yuan against The Beijing Times's 1.21 billion.

The Beijing Times had launched two years earlier. Among its founders was Zhu Defu, another Southern Metropolis Daily man. Its Beijing partner carried even more weight: People's Daily. Unlike The Beijing News, The Beijing Times never advertised itself as a paper for the "high end." In Zhu's own words: "I never wanted to run a paper for intellectuals or for the rich and powerful. I run a paper for migrant workers, and I'm proud of it."

The Oriental Morning Post's advertising grew over the same years. It ran two years of losses before 2005 — the year Han Wenqian marks as the end of the golden age — but Qu Tingxian felt the difference afterwards: "From 2007 to 2010, 2011, [the Oriental Morning Post's ad revenue] grew fast." Qu joined at the 2003 launch to run layout and design and left in 2013, by then deputy general manager.

A senior manager at the Oriental Morning Post who asked not to be named confirmed it to QDaily: the paper's ad revenue "grew fivefold after 2006. It passed 100 million yuan in 2007 and went straight to 200 million in 2008. Tenfold in three years — from 20 million to 200 million in two and a half."

That breakthrough began with what everyone there calls going from "broadsheet" to "tabloid." Years on, it looks like a successful compromise.

"Back then, good reviews didn't mean a big audience, because the format itself limited who read you. Only when it went tabloid did the Oriental Morning Post's influence start to spread," Zhao Yang said.

In October 2006, the Oriental Morning Post dropped its broadsheet pages for the tabloid format most metro papers used. It was a global trend too: The Times of London, The Wall Street Journal and others were all getting smaller and narrower.

"Broadsheet to tabloid was only a question of form, but it marked the Oriental Morning Post's move from a would-be hundred-year, New York Times–style paper to an ordinary metro paper," Xu said. "It wasn't only page size, it was a change of ambition... A painful choice, philosophically."

(IV)

Whatever else, the Oriental Morning Post had found its confidence. Better finances also let it try new things, and in 2008 it started a weekend supplement, Shanghai Review of Books.

By then The Beijing News and Southern Metropolis Daily already had good book pages. Qiu Bing, the Oriental Morning Post's editor-in-chief at the time, wanted a reading section that was "less like everyone else's," with an intellectual cast. He brought in Lu Hao, founder of Wanxiang magazine, and Huang Xiaofeng, a director at Shanghai Classics Publishing House, to start Shanghai Review of Books.

Zhang Mingyang, the supplement's executive editor, remembers no advertising pressure on it at all. What they discussed most was how to make a reading section that would "make people think the Oriental Morning Post is a beautiful paper — at the very least a paper with real cultural taste."

One line has followed the supplement ever since: "New York has The New York Review of Books, London has the London Review of Books — how could Shanghai not have the Shanghai Review of Books?" That line still sits on Shanghai Review of Books's homepage; Zhang calls it "an unofficial slogan."

In Beijing, Zou Bo joined The Beijing News around this stage as its film editor. In 2006 the paper was "full of energy, at its height." "Everybody felt we were the best in the capital, and sure of it — you'd sleep in a bit and then walk into the office every morning, head up and chest out, into the sunrise."

He credits that good state of mind to the thinking handed down from the top: "Do professional work, make professional judgments... whatever call we made had to be sounder and more professional than anyone else's, no amateur talk. That's what we were after."

The Beijing News went through a management shakeup at the end of 2005 — "everyone felt the paper would change, that it wouldn't be the Beijing News that was 'responsible for reporting everything' any more, and their professional ideals must have taken a blow" — but Yang Huayun, who joined then as a political reporter, was later grateful that "the old leaders were gone, but the spirit stayed."

By this time Jian Guangzhou had spent three years as a reporter on the Oriental Morning Post's features desk. Two years later he wrote the Sanlu infant-formula story that brought him honor and fame. After it appeared, public attention forced Sanlu Group to halt production for restructuring; Zhang Fawang, deputy mayor of Shijiazhuang, Hebei, and Ji Chuntang, deputy party secretary and mayor of the city, were among the officials removed from office, and several Sanlu executives were sentenced to life or to terms of five to fifteen years.

"Truth was revealed by conscience; the cover-up was broken open by courage. He broke the media's unspoken rule, said the words 'Sanlu' outright, and set off an earthquake through China's dairy industry, indirectly saving the health and lives of countless infants. Behind this ant shaking an elephant were the honesty and courage of him and the paper he worked for, the Oriental Morning Post, which restored journalism's public value and its role as watchdog. He was only a reporter, but he spoke for the conscience of Chinese media in 2008," read the citation naming Jian Guangzhou New Weekly's Rising Star of the Year for 2008.

But to the man who wrote it, it was an accident. "Looking at the Sanlu thing ourselves — if we'd known at the time how important it was, how big the impact would be, and taken it back to discuss whether to run it, whether it would have made the paper at all is a question mark," Jian said.

His former colleague Xu Jun agrees; he thinks the story's impact carried "a degree of chance." "The editor on duty that night probably didn't realize how powerful the piece was."

What was actually on Jian's mind then was quitting for another line of work. "The work you do every day is trivial. A lot of what you write is very small — you're not spending all day questioning and investigating."

Most of the time he covered local news in Shanghai, the Oriental Morning Post's home ground. "It's not that you're writing important stories every day; a lot of the time the work is just dull." He still remembers his first out-of-town assignment: an investigation into lobster. He won't say what it found or where it took him. "Looking back, it was a small story, not a very interesting one."

That feeling — "journalism really is trivial" — stayed with Jian until he left in 2012. Other things bothered him too, such as an investigation he had worked on into bile taken from live bears. "For all sorts of reasons it never ran in the end. That was a huge issue at the time too."

Yang Huayun felt the same. Before he joined The Beijing News in 2006, he had been Jian's colleague on the Oriental Morning Post's features desk. As he remembers it, only while Xu Jun oversaw the desk were "we still pretty bold — he'd push the team to go further."

There was only so much Xu could do. "They had no regular beat and no fixed pages, so a little pressure and they were squeezed out. On some level people also thought their stories carried risk." To Yang, "the department was being pushed to the margins."

Features and critical reporting were not marginal only inside the Oriental Morning Post. Part of it was business: features are "high input, low output," an inefficient form in a metro paper built on speed, volume and page count.

More important, restrictions on the press kept narrowing the room for stories that might have social impact.

An influential paper, whatever it modeled itself on, wanted to be read across the country. West China Metropolis Daily, Huashang Bao and other metro papers had run watchdog stories outside their own regions in the late 1990s, but around 2005 such cross-regional reporting began to be restricted. That made investigative and critical journalism harder for metro papers — the source of the "risk" Xu Jun mentioned.

The Beijing News hit the same wall. "I only caught the tail end of The Beijing News. I wasn't there for the best of it," Yang Huayun sometimes says. The best of it was "a time bursting with idealism, when everyone was living for their ideals."

To the scholar Xu Jilin, newspapers everywhere divide into broadsheets and tabloids, and the difference between them "isn't circulation. What matters most is that a broadsheet has a position and an attitude of its own, and doesn't hide that attitude. A tabloid is an opportunist." The Beijing News and the Oriental Morning Post had both wanted to be that kind of broadsheet.

But the peak had passed. The Beijing News had already been through two editors-in-chief. Cheng Yizhong was out within six months of the launch, and Yang Bin had left as well. After 2005 the paper's slogan changed from "Responsible for Reporting Everything" to "Quality Comes From Responsibility." At the Oriental Morning Post, Shen Hao and Southern Media Group had pulled out before the first issue.

(V)

The bigger trouble was the pressure piling up from digital media.

Around 2005, at a gathering of journalists, Sina.com editor-in-chief Chen Tong remarked that no single print outlet spent anything close to what Sina spent on news. The portals, Sina above all, were then objects of both love and hatred for these newspaper bosses. Many papers treated making "Sina's front page" as the mark of success and a performance target, and the shrewder publishers knew perfectly well it was drinking poison to slake a thirst — but there seemed to be nothing better. These portals, their competitors, had become the channel through which they projected their own influence.

In a sense, the influence the Oriental Morning Post achieved with the 2008 Sanlu story was already not its own doing alone. CCTV, Xinhua News Agency and People's Daily Online all reprinted and commented on the story at the time, and it reached readers outside Shanghai mainly through the portals' reprints. In fact, search the original headline today — "14 Infants in Gansu Diagnosed With Kidney Disease, Suspected Link to Sanlu Infant Formula" — and the first result at the top of the page is Sina News's reprint.

The fatal blow came after smartphones spread. In 2009 Sina launched Weibo, and its 140-character posts trained people to read short and fast. Mobile apps sped the fragmentation of information, and smartphones pulled attention onto screens, eating the long stretches of time people once gave a newspaper.

Xu Jun believes that reading's move from paper to screen looked like a change of form and channel but really meant a wholly different way of focusing attention, which in turn pushed back on how content is made.

Xu worked that out later, though. He left the Oriental Morning Post at the end of 2006, at 29 and deputy editor-in-chief. He still felt young, but grew anxious about a job that consisted of "sitting there every day and signing off on things," with "nothing else to do." He also felt the "huge shock" the portals were giving traditional media, and kept looking for a way out. In 2004 he invested in an information-visualization design company. From 2008 he wrote a column on the press, "Media Notes," for FT Chinese, and later founded Newrank, whose most important service is collecting data on new media, including WeChat official accounts, and ranking them. Xu now writes under a better-known pen name: Xu Danei.

People kept leaving.

Zou Bo, The Beijing News's film editor, left in 2010, joined Guokr a few months later, and now runs his own video startup, Nutcracker Studio. Its signature product is a short-video series called "One-Minute Sex Ed."

Of the reporters who worked with Jian Guangzhou on the Oriental Morning Post's features desk, one is still at a newspaper today.

Traditional media's advertising was falling hard, of course.

According to Bi Yun, senior operations manager in the MICE custom services department at Meihua.info, newspaper ad placements in China fell 19.2% in 2012 from a year earlier — "the first annual decline in a decade." A report cited by Xinhuanet's New Media Watch bears the trend out: in 2012, Chinese newspaper ad billings went from an 11.2% year-on-year rise to a 7.3% fall. A year later nothing had improved.

The tide had gone out. From 2014 on, more and more print outlets announced they were closing, and the openings left to them kept shrinking. The China Newspaper Industry 2016 Report (《中国报业 2016 报告》) says: "In 2015, total retail sales of newspapers of all kinds nationwide fell 46.5% from 2014, with metro papers falling furthest — retail circulation of metro papers dropped 50.8% in 2015, the steepest of any category." Print's sales channels shrank too: between the end of 2008 and 2013, poor sales led to the removal of 10,468 postal newsstands across the country.

Meanwhile, smartphone shipments in China rose from 70 million units in 2011 to 390 million in 2014; in the first three quarters of 2016 alone they reached 328 million.

A smartphone delivers information far more efficiently than print ever did — cheaper to get, and readable anywhere, any time.

These outlets, carrying their enormous sense of mission, set about remaking themselves.

The Beijing News's unsuccessful attempts at new media began as early as 2009, when it launched an internet product called Instant News. The logic was simple: reporters filed their stories into a materials database the moment they finished them, and editors picked pieces in real time to publish on the website.

What Zou Bo saw was a gap between vision and capacity, and a conflict between the paper's development and the individual's. Almost nobody wanted to work on the project; it was treated as a burden. In the end it had to draw lots to decide who would edit it.

"The top two people running it didn't understand the internet. It had stepped onto the right road, but it didn't know how to run down it," Zou said. "The Beijing News was a step ahead every time. But honestly, as old hands who loved it and resented it in equal measure, we never got to eat it hot."

The Oriental Morning Post's own new-media project arrived in July 2014, with far more noise: The Paper. Editor-in-chief Qiu Bing wrote the founding editorial, "My Heart Still Surges as It Did Yesterday" (《我心澎湃如昨》).

"Qiu Bing always gave the impression of someone not much interested in the craft — more the type to be out drinking with friends." But after The Paper started, Xu found his old friend had "changed a great deal."

When The Paper went live, Qiu Bing was 46 and had spent almost 25 years in traditional media. Strictly speaking, it wasn't only the Oriental Morning Post's new-media project; it was also the most important internet product to come out of Shanghai United Media Group, newly formed when Jiefang Daily Press Group and Wenhui-Xinmin United Press Group merged and reorganized.

"Going from the Oriental Morning Post to The Paper was a war," Zhao Yang said. To this former deputy editor-in-chief of The Paper, the people who fought it were "young, tireless, spoiling for it," and also "extremely professional."

Zhao has left too, for a startup called Pear Video. His new boss is Qiu Bing again — the man who built the Oriental Morning Post in 2003 and The Paper in 2014.

As Xu remembers it, Qiu Bing was 35 when he founded the Oriental Morning Post, always carrying a small shoulder bag, with a touch of the old-school boss about him. He and Xu were the only two who left the security of the state system at Wenhui Daily for the new paper.

The Paper is considered one of the most successful of these transformations. The capital it drew far exceeded the 150 million yuan raised 11 years earlier: public information shows it took "300 to 400 million yuan" from government and consortium investors at its founding, and it recently announced another 610 million yuan, all from Shanghai state capital. Zhongrun Media — the other small shareholder besides Wenhui-Xinmin Group when the Oriental Morning Post launched, and at its height Shanghai's largest private ad agency, handling ad sales for Shenjiang Service Guide, Shanghai Morning Post, Xinmin Evening News, the Shanghai Documentary Channel and other outlets — was bought by Xinhua Media in 2008.

(VI)

On the second-to-last day of December 2016, Xu says, old Oriental Morning Post colleagues got up a small dinner, more than 30 people, at a restaurant on Weihai Road called Xiao Shihui. It's tiny, four tables. Xu says it's where they used to eat after work or after a night shift, a place they'd "been eating at for over ten years," and that night "we packed it."

Some at the table came from The Paper, some from Pear Video, some had scattered elsewhere.

But there was no longer a newspaper called the Oriental Morning Post.

In May 2003, with SARS spreading across China, posters hung all over the three floors the Oriental Morning Post occupied at No. 839 Middle Yan'an Road — the 4th, the 8th, the 21st: "The sun rises in the East, great fortune for China."

That slogan came from Shen Hao too. He is now serving a prison term over the 21st Century group's financial dealings.

The day before the Oriental Morning Post closed, The Beijing Times published its last issue. Its staff all moved to Beijing Morning Post or left. Founder Zhu Defu, who quit in 2009, went on to become a vice president for Alibaba's media business. In an interview before the paper folded, he said that although he had long known print was finished, "we thought it would be a parabola. It turned out to be a cliff."

"[Control] loosens sometimes and tightens other times," Han Wenqian, The Beijing News's first general manager, said in an interview. "You always felt society was moving forward, that we were working hard, that the ceiling would rise — or maybe even go away." In 2015, after resigning as chief executive of a rail and aviation media operator, he founded an internet company. He left The Beijing News in 2007, at what he calls its best moment, and won't discuss anything to do with The New York Times.

"China will never have a New York Times. China will never have a New York Times," he said.

Lately, alongside all the grim stories going around the media business, the one people repeat most is about Zhang Yiming. He is the CEO of Toutiao, China's most successful news content platform at the moment, with 2016 advertising revenue reportedly at 6 billion yuan. "We're not a media company," he says, "because we don't create content, and we don't publish opinions."

Cover image from marshillonline.com, typepad.com