These Foreigners Have Run a Lifestyle Media Outlet in Shanghai for 15 Years. What Have They Been Through?

Making good content in an age when everyone chases clicks.

Call SmartShanghai a media outlet and its website looks almost too useful to be one: the top of the page is still articles and reporting, the middle layer starts to look like Dianping, and if you keep scrolling, a full spread of rental listings opens up.

SmartShanghai is entirely in English, and has been for all 15 years.

If there's been any bad luck lately, it's this: its only Chinese-language outlet — the young woman who translated its English articles into Chinese (quite well) and ran the WeChat official account — quit. So SmartShanghai has shrunk back into being entirely English.

That may not matter much. The point from the beginning was to help foreigners newly arrived in Shanghai understand the city. People who had just landed couldn't yet explore it through Chinese-language media, and most English-language magazines offered either the same tired lineup of Western restaurants and famous sights, or macro politics and economics that had nothing to do with life in the city.

SmartShanghai is confident it can write about the authentic side of Shanghai — that even on eating, drinking and having fun, it is better than locals at finding the city's hidden pleasures.

One famous piece is the Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index. Christopher St. Cavish, a SmartShanghai contributor, spent 16 months visiting 52 xiao long bao restaurants in Shanghai to write it. Every time he ate xiao long bao he brought along some odd equipment: an electronic scale, a pair of calipers and a pair of hairdressing scissors. Cavish even worked out his own formula: (filling + soup / wrapper × 100). He used it to calculate the structural engineering of each dumpling, and anything that scored low didn't get recommended.

Clearly this is not how Chinese people usually judge xiao long bao. Phrases like "thin skin, plenty of soup, generous filling, fresh meat" are nowhere to be found; scientific calculation takes their place.

Cavish is a proud man. He has lived in Shanghai for 12 years and writes only for SmartShanghai: "SmartShanghai is the only place that lets me write this kind of thing." He has never even considered Shanghai's other English-language magazines, Time Out and City Weekend among them: "My style doesn't fit them, and I don't want to change my style."

Sometimes a piece like that brings enormous attention and fame, especially once it is translated into Chinese and posted to the WeChat account. Other pieces strike a chord with only part of the audience — like the one where Cavish combed through the neighborhoods on Shanghai's edges and found the last wok maker in Shanghai, a craftsman who for decades sat on a straw chair by the roadside and made a living from an awning, a hand-written sign and a few tools. Chengguan, the urban management officers, cleared him out for blocking the sidewalk. Craftspeople who live this way are disappearing faster and faster.

When he finds a lead, Cavish will write something genuinely specialist for SmartShanghai — the profit-and-loss statement of an Italian restaurant, for instance, which explains point by point how Western restaurants survive in Shanghai. A proper piece of reporting, he believes, has to connect the foreigners living in Shanghai to the city itself. So when he saw a magazine introducing foreigners to Shanghai's eyewear market, it made him angry.

"Why does a pair of glasses cost $700 in the US and only 150 yuan in this market in China? What's the economics behind this market? Is it because China has very advanced eyewear manufacturing technology? Or is eyewear manufacturing simple, and the American eyewear industry wants you to think it's complicated so it can charge a lot? Is the quality at different prices really that different?" he said. "That's the story I want to write. I'd go into that market and talk to the people who have worked there the longest and the shortest."

SmartShanghai's founder, Alexander Weng, admires Cavish's work and pays him a fee for every long piece, sometimes plus several thousand yuan a month in reimbursed expenses. Set against the site's own revenue, that is often not small money.

Weng — more often called Alex — is a German who seems a little shy and is in fact rather stubborn. To this day he has never replied to a job application whose cover letter ran longer than three lines. "Three hundred words are already enough to tell me whether you're right for this job… If your very first email to me already bores me, how boring must your writing be?"

Fifteen years ago he and two fellow German exchange students in Shanghai tinkered SmartShanghai into existence, turned it from its original forum format into something built mainly on reporting, and later added rentals, restaurant reviews and other sections.

However the platform changed, Alex's insistence on good content never did. He stubbornly holds that flipping through image-stuffed trending news or gossip does not count as "reading" at all: "People are consuming content, but they're not reading much." Reading, to him, is still an imaginative space built out of words strung together, and a news story has to have a story of real value behind it.

On top of that, a piece has to be "useful, funny and interesting," and it has to "either be the first to report it, or be written better than everyone else's."

"Useful" applies mostly to foreigners, though it sometimes has unexpected effects on Chinese readers. Two years ago SmartShanghai published a piece called How to Use Alipay; today it covers every emerging topic, bike-sharing and ride-hailing included, without missing one.

"Foreigners here have no family, no Chinese friends. You don't know how things work, so of course you get angry… like when you see a taxi with its light on and you think, why the fuck won't it stop? If you don't understand ride-hailing, imagine how angry you'd be," Cavish told QDaily.

Chinese readers can of course find the same information filling their screens elsewhere, but SmartShanghai's "foreigner" angle delivers observations of the "emperor has no clothes" sort. That appeal is something China's nonfiction writers have long chased — the figure they love to talk about is Peter Hessler, formerly The New Yorker's correspondent in China — but SmartShanghai carries none of that baggage. For them it comes naturally.

"Funny and interesting," it turns out, is much harder than "useful."

"Shanghai is gripped by a severe and stubborn Disney fever, like some form of malaria — anything even tangentially connected to Disney is a gold mine." "Sitting on the Barbie bus, pulling out of People's Square, I immediately felt a purely dreamlike experience: we hit a traffic jam." "This burger tasted like the essence of the ocean wrapped tightly in somebody's toenail clippings — krill, cartilage and foot juice. The foot juice even ran down into my beard…"

Those lines come from SmartShanghai's editor-in-chief, Morgan Short, who is also a living illustration of what this publication is. He has been to nearly every cheap bar in Shanghai and wrote The Ultimate Guide to Cheap Bar Burgers — neither the burgers nor the bars escape his sharp tongue. "This bar always delivers one debauched night. The people around you are people you would never want to add on WeChat."

Morgan has been to more than 900 bars and clubs in Shanghai, and goes out at least four nights a week. During the day he tries all kinds of peculiar experiences, like riding the newest Barbie sightseeing bus; some of the lines above come from A Middle-Aged Man's Barbie Dream Bus Tour.

In the "Man vs. Food" column he goads interesting people into stuffing weird, delicious or unusual food into their mouths — he once took two American members of the Blue Man Group to a FamilyMart for oden, chasing soup-filled beef balls with erguotou. Another column, "10 Year Club," picks out foreigners who have lived in Shanghai for more than ten years and tries to work out why they are still here, and what has changed over the years.

Morgan describes himself as "heretical, doesn't do things by the book." He looks like a rock star: an explosion of loose curls spilling messily over his shoulders, a full beard merging into them, both arms covered in brightly colored tattoos.

Before he became editor-in-chief, Morgan played bass in a punk rock band. In SmartShanghai's early editorial days he wrote articles on weekdays and toured cities across China on weekends.

China also has foreign correspondents working for big outlets like NPR and The New York Times, but Morgan doesn't envy them. Half-joking, he said: "They're super boring. We don't hang out."

At the end of every article SmartShanghai spells out its position: "We do not do paid promotion of any kind. We strive to judge this city fairly, and we want her — Shanghai — to keep getting better." Inside the company, editorial and sales keep out of each other's way; sales staff aren't even allowed to talk to Morgan.

Nobody at this company plays by the advertising industry's rules either. A small icon on the SmartShanghai website costs 6,000 yuan a month. The team sets its own prices, but online display advertising is rarely priced by the month, let alone at 6,000 yuan a month.

Here is how Alex got to that price. He estimates that about 20 people click a restaurant's icon each day, that 10% of them — 2 people — will actually walk into the restaurant, and that at 100 yuan per head, the icon brings the restaurant 6,000 yuan in revenue a month.

Pricing advertising off conversion rates is something only search engines with enormous traffic dare to do.

Advertising was also one of the direct reasons the WeChat account Fashionable Shanghai shut down. It had run for three years, with articles averaging 2,000 to 3,000 clicks, but it couldn't sell much advertising and never made the company much money.

Alex knows that plenty of WeChat accounts inflate the view counts they report to advertisers, and that advertisers are often happy to stick their fingers in their ears and go along with it. He refuses to be swept up in this culture of fakery, just as he isn't afraid of offending people by staying independent and saying what he thinks.

"Fair is fair. We won't change that. Absolutely not, never." If a dispute comes up, Morgan handles it as editor-in-chief, and his method is: "I'll say sorry. Do you want a hug?"

The article runs unchanged.

SmartShanghai's advertising business leans mostly on promotion from foreigner-run restaurants and bars, and that industry is sliding. Christopher St. Cavish, who spent ten years as a chef, reckons that even the most successful food businesses — mostly Western restaurants — run gross margins of just 10% to 20%, and that over the past two or three years, as ingredient and labor costs have risen, those margins have kept thinning. Naturally there is less money left for advertising.

Alex has talked to investors, and it only confirmed what he suspected: investors care too much about money. "But money doesn't equal good content. Money often leads to bad content. In China you get big, but your quality isn't good," he said.

Eight years ago, three months of talks between SmartShanghai and a British investor ended as a nightmare: the contract was signed, the investor went bankrupt, and SmartShanghai had a hard time getting out. Five years ago the South China Morning Post came knocking too, wanting a deal with SmartShanghai that bet on its annual revenue.

"We're not a chain pizza place. How could we possibly grow that fast?" Alex told QDaily.

But once he woke from the investor nightmare, Alex saw that SmartShanghai needed a sensible way to make money. So a site that once only did content now also runs a merchant system (nearby restaurants, bars and so on) and a classifieds function (ticket sales, rentals, job listings and so on). Neither interferes with the independence of the content.

The rental section has done particularly well. Agents have to pay a fee to post listings on SmartShanghai. Agents routinely put up fake listing photos online to hook people in, but the moment SmartShanghai finds that the photos don't match reality, it blocks the listing, paying client or not. "We're the only honest rental site, and that's why we've succeeded," Alex said.

SmartShanghai can't live on rentals alone, though. There are only 170,000 foreigners in Shanghai, non-English speakers included, so the market for any single section by itself isn't big enough.

The size of the foreign population — and in some sense its quality — limits more than SmartShanghai's revenue. It also leaves them unable to find enough qualified colleagues.

SmartShanghai's editorial team is three writers, Morgan included, plus two freelance contributors. Every Monday, Alex, the three writers, the graphic designer and the photographer settle the week's story list in an editorial meeting: 5 long pieces and 7 short ones, covering restaurants, nightlife, community topics such as health insurance and housing, and a few standalone stories.

Output at that density clearly needs more hands, but the editorial team has never managed to grow over the years. "20% of people make spelling mistakes, 80% of people aren't interesting enough," Alex said. He rarely meets a professional journalist who catches his eye.

The problem feeds itself. SmartShanghai doesn't have enough capital, so its starting salaries can't attract experienced reporters and editors, and it can't sort out work visas for foreigners either. Morgan, now 38, has worked at SmartShanghai for 10 years; the other two, both new reporters, have been there six months and are both 23.

What's interesting is that Alex isn't especially anxious. In German eyes, SmartShanghai counts as "successful" — the German definition of "success" being "your work lets you have a decent life" — and SmartShanghai has stayed "okay" throughout.

When Alex first came to China he set himself a deadline for leaving: the World Expo. The Expo ended seven years ago and he is still in Shanghai. Every year he says he'll stay one more, and he has now given up on setting himself any final date. He still isn't satisfied with the site: partly because what he wanted to do hasn't happened, and partly because "SmartShanghai isn't big enough to sell, and it isn't small enough to stop right now and walk away. I don't really have a choice."

He and Morgan sit in an odd position because of this. China changes so fast that as a business they feel nobody pays them any attention; as a media outlet, they get to watch the market grow new features as fast as fruit flies evolve.

"Three or four years ago, ranking pieces — Top 10s, Top 5s — could easily pull in shares and attention, but now readers' tastes have shifted again," Morgan told QDaily. Over the past six months, the most-shared and most influential pieces on SmartShanghai have all been in-depth reports of around 8,000 words.

That is the direction SmartShanghai wants to push harder in. Reporting like that needs reporters with deep experience, years of writing behind them and accumulated contacts — and the resources Alex can draw on are limited. Which brings everything back to talking about the business.

Cover image and in-body images: SmartShanghai, Virginia