Sanlian's New Knowledge Is on Hiatus: How Does a Content Product Born at the Wrong Time Stay Alive?

Does making a print magazine have to mean scraping by?

A magazine unlike any other does more than open an era — it creates a new community. Every successful magazine can be seen as having "awakened people of real character, making them realize that they in fact belong to some new community now taking shape."

In the course of creating that community, some succeed, some fail, and some are cut short by forces outside their control.

In that sense, even a magazine as unsuccessful as New Knowledge shows you the effort being made.

We will soon publish a series of reports on magazines — publications unlike any other, which once played an important part in the world we live in.

In 2013, Sanlian began promoting a new magazine. Asked what its positioning was, its editor-in-chief at the time, Miao Wei, answered: "First, we're editing a magazine we'd want to read ourselves... If it survives, I want it to be a liberal-arts magazine for the internet age — written by professionals in every field, for professionals in every field."

In April 2017, that magazine, New Knowledge (《新知》), suspended publication, with no date set for its return.

New Knowledge was a bimonthly, formally launched in 2014. It sold for 20 yuan, was printed in a 19-kai trim size, and ran about 160 pages an issue. Nearly every article was written by a professor at an overseas university or a PhD student in the humanities or the sciences, with a short story or two added, plus translations of new work by fashionable foreign intellectuals. The illustrations and photographs, on the cover and inside, all came from well-known Chinese illustrators and photographers. The magazine took on permanent subjects — linguistics, mythology, architecture, artificial intelligence — but pulled them in through lively angles: English (《英格力士》), Always Citing Greece (《言必称希腊》), When Spring Comes, Build a House (《春暖开花造房子》), Brain-Computer Interface (《脑机界面》).

When the hiatus was announced in April, almost nobody discussed it. The official notice on New Knowledge's Weibo account was reposted about a hundred times and drew 60 comments. Two months later, someone asked on Zhihu, "Why did New Knowledge stop publishing?" Miao Wei — the magazine's founder and a former deputy editor-in-chief of Sanlian Lifeweek — stepped in to clarify that it was "only a hiatus; it could still come back." That reply also drew only about a hundred upvotes and comments.

For its loyal readers, though, the news came far too suddenly. New Knowledge had a steady reputation online, but it did not make money. Its business model still rested on advertising — and even setting its niche positioning aside, advertising revenue across print was falling hard. Starting a magazine at that moment really was bad timing.

Good product, bad market; readers' habits remade by smartphones and the internet — these familiar explanations can certainly account for what happened to New Knowledge. But there is another way to put the question: how does a niche content product find a way to live in today's tangled landscape? Is survival really impossible for something like New Knowledge?

The Readers Weren't Gone — They Were Just Cut Off

By 2015, New Knowledge had more than 20,000 regular readers an issue, which proves it was not short of an audience. Twenty thousand people genuinely cannot keep a magazine alive, but for a book it is a respectable number.

Go back to the question above and you'll notice its subject is "a product," not "a magazine." The same collection of content would have met a completely different fate as a book than it did as a magazine.

Sanlian's plan was to publish a magazine, and that decision pushed back Miao Wei's "liberal-arts magazine for the internet age" by seven years, because Sanlian had to wait for the periodical license that would make it legal.

In China, periodical licenses are controlled more tightly than book numbers. Book numbers are applied for under real names by state-owned publishing houses that hold a publishing license, submitted to the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, and handed out in proportion to how many editors each house has registered. Periodical licenses are issued in far smaller numbers, and applying for one is more complicated still.

Miao Wei wrote the first proposal for New Knowledge in 2006, which was not a bad moment for print. By 2013 everything had changed. New Knowledge had an annual budget of 3 million yuan, but it had to cover staff, contributor fees, printing, distribution and more — above all the channel fees at the airports in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, which ran as high as 900,000 yuan.

Recall quickly what 2013 looked like: nationwide periodical circulation fell 20 to 30 percent year on year, and newsstands began vanishing in large numbers — that year Zhengzhou tore down its last one, and Nanjing removed nearly half of its stands. Meanwhile the "network access fees" charged by special channels such as airport bookshops and bookshops inside malls and supermarkets rose every year.

Because New Knowledge printed few copies, its actual sell-through in physical channels may not even have matched online shopping. Miao Wei worked with JD.com and Amazon, and shared some of Sanlian Lifeweek's distribution channels — Beijing's Haidian district, thick with universities, for instance.

With so few copies on shelves, many readers preferred to subscribe. Then they hit a different problem: "you could find a postal distribution code on the cover, but you couldn't use that code to subscribe at the post office," because "the magazine's minimum order quantity didn't meet the Beijing Postal Administration's requirement, and the distribution department didn't think it was worth paying an extra fee for that." Editor Yu Lisha simply began printing the phone numbers of distributors in 27 cities on the contents page from issue 17 on, so readers could contact them directly.

In other words, readers had not abandoned New Knowledge. They just couldn't get hold of it.

What If New Knowledge Weren't a Magazine

In 2006, the year Miao Wei wrote that first proposal, Zhang Lixian — known as "Old Six" — launched Duku (《读库》). It came out on the same bimonthly cycle, ran 317 pages, and carried mid-length pieces of 5,000 to 50,000 characters, but it used a book number rather than a periodical license, which made it a "MOOK," a magazine-book.

The real difference between a magazine and a MOOK lies in distribution and in how each makes money. Put simply, the strict limits magazines face barely touch MOOKs, because MOOKs earn their money mainly at retail.

Zhiri (《知日》), founded in 2011, was also a MOOK. Its first four issues came out under Wenzhi Books, an imprint of Motie, after which editor-in-chief Su Jing struck out on his own and found a partner in CITIC Press. Su Jing's team made the content; CITIC handled publishing and distribution. As Li Xiaotong, a marketing editor at CITIC Press, put it, the advantage of CITIC's channel was that "physical stores can be covered more widely, and new titles can get better placement."

Just inside the door of the One Way Street bookstore in Chaoyang Joy City, Zhiri's 32nd issue, a special on Osamu Dazai (《太宰治》), sat on prominent display; a clerk told us it was Zhiri's best seller of late. The retail directory on the back page listed more than 80 outlets: besides mass-market chains like Xinhua Bookstore, it included independent and boutique chains such as One Way Street, Sisyphe, Librairie Avant-Garde and Page One, plus airport terminals in Beijing, Hangzhou, Fuzhou, Xi'an and Xiamen.

Duku went further and skipped traditional book distributors altogether. To cut channel costs and control inventory, it opened a Taobao store in February 2008. At the Drum Tower West Theatre and the Sculpting in Time café in Beijing, readers could also order by scanning a QR code. In an interview with QDaily last year, Zhang Lixian said sales through small bookshops and Dangdang had become insignificant for Duku.

Niche Positioning Was Never Why Niche Products Disappear

New Knowledge spent what it took on content, and with marketing money extremely tight, that was the only reason it won readers at all.

The pilot issue, Brain-Computer Interface, came out in January 2014 with 15 commissioned writers, among them Cai Tianxin, a mathematics professor at Zhejiang University; Wan Weigang, a physics PhD from the University of Colorado; Zhu Jisong, who taught in Fudan University's English department; and Ouyang Liangqi, a PhD candidate in materials science and engineering at the University of Delaware.

Editor Yu Lisha remembers that when she first joined New Knowledge, Miao Wei explained why only professionals were allowed to write for it: it was "in pursuit of a humble attitude toward writing." "Don't imagine that interviewing a few so-called experts and reading a few books really qualifies you to tell readers how to think about a question. This magazine wants the author of every article to be someone who genuinely has the standing to speak."

Because it commissioned pieces rather than reporting and editing them the way most magazines do, New Knowledge's editorial team was small. The only outside hires Miao Wei brought in were art director Sun Xiaoxi and photo director Tian Ke. Illustrations made up 30 to 40 percent of the images in each issue, partly because the subjects New Knowledge took on were fairly abstract. To keep everything original, Sun Xiaoxi and Tian Ke sought out every illustrator and photographer specifically to suit the piece at hand. On the contents page, the numerals "1, 2, 3, 4" that divided the sections were hand-drawn by a different illustrator every issue.

On this point New Knowledge in fact resembled MOOKs like Duku and Zhiri, even though what they published looked nothing alike.

Duku, with articles of 5,000 to 50,000 characters, often ran pieces that tested a reader's limits: a series on German court cases, say, or a ninety-odd-page paper on ancient Roman architecture. Some readers still "forced themselves to read" them, believing the pieces managed "a small touch of personal flair on top of a highly specialized foundation."

An editor at CITIC Press told QDaily that Duku had already built a brand, and a solid brand holds on to a steady readership. Zhang Lixian himself still doubts how long that brand can hold — of the 1,000 people who subscribed to Duku in 2006, only 400 remain — but one fact is undeniable: Duku has survived 11 years, has more than 13,000 subscribers, and has gone from issue 0600 in 2006 to issue 1704 in 2017.

What Is a Sensible Way for Niche Content to Survive?

When Zhiri was founded under Motie in 2011, its editor-in-chief Su Jing believed that a traditional magazine's dependence on advertising limited how nimble it could be. He left Motie only after publishing four issues, and then began running Zhiri with CITIC Press.

Xu Hang, a former colleague of Su Jing's and once an editor in Motie's Wenzhi Books division, recalls that CITIC Press gave Su Jing free space, sparing him rent, and covered the main publishing and distribution costs of making books — leaving staff and marketing as his main expenses.

Su Jing called Zhiri a "content brand." Once Zhiri, positioned mainly as popular reading on Japanese culture, had become known, he started building a Zhiri website, a Taobao shop called Zhiri Store, and Japanese-language courses. Explaining to the press why he was launching a string of businesses that had nothing to do with books, he called them "economies of scope." "What we want isn't economies of scale, it's economies of scope — we plant one point as the foundation, then hang extra content on top of it."

After Zhiri, Su Jing built separate teams for Rihe Shoutie (《日和手帖》), Shitie (《食帖》) and Zhizhong (《知中》), themed on lifestyle, food and traditional Chinese culture — all "content built around a vertical keyword." They were priced between 39 and 60 yuan, and Zhiri's best-selling issue sold 80,000 copies. None of these magazine-book series carried advertising, but as Su Jing himself kept saying wherever he spoke, "the content is the ad." Leaf through Zhiri's 24th issue, Sundries (《杂货》), and you find a piece titled "A Soap-Making Obsession" (《制皂情节》) with a QR code for Zhiri Store; the inside front and inside back covers carry promotional copy for Shitie and Rihe Shoutie.

"The key is the user base a magazine-book builds — a group with money to spend. Once you have that group's attention, you can make money on products, and you can make money as media too," Su Jing told one interviewer.

The word "vertical" came up when we talked to Zhang Lixian, too. At first it meant publishing books of a similar sensibility alongside Duku's seven issues a year: the 2009 Peking opera book Zhang Huoding, the Qingyi (《青衣张火丁》), Textbooks of the Republic (《共和国教科书》) in 2011, the 2012 book on the aesthetics of daily life Heirloom (《传家》), and in 2014 My Life, the autobiography of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. From late 2015 they also began putting out merchandise: Feng Zikai art books, single prints, notebooks and calendars.

In that earlier interview with QDaily, Zhang Lixian said this fit modern commercial logic better — "you don't put a book about growing flowers next to a book about fishing, you put a fishing rod there."

"The biggest misconception our own thinking has produced is that publishing on paper and the internet are opposed to each other," Su Jing said on May 14, standing in a café on Meishuguan Houjie in Beijing's Dongcheng district. He was speaking at a talk hosted by Zhizhong and Zuoshu, titled "How to Make a Good MOOK." He described Zhizhong's business structure as Weibo, WeChat and the magazine itself: Weibo and WeChat are free content that attracts users, and Zhizhong is the content people pay for.

From August 2015, Duku's WeChat official account also began posting carefully made short videos, from a few minutes to more than ten minutes long, with Zhang Lixian on camera introducing the books he had made. The most popular one drew 780,000 views on Tencent Video; its subject was Lin Huiyin — very Duku.

Sanlian's Predicament

We once asked Miao Wei whether he had considered running New Knowledge on a book number instead of a periodical license. His answer: "No. Then we couldn't have run ads."

In 2006 that answer was beyond reproach; perhaps Sanlian simply carried the decision forward into 2013. Looking back at what he regrets about New Knowledge, what Miao Wei still sighs over is that "it missed the WeChat dividend period — we never did 'keep the magazine going and pour real effort into a WeChat account' at the same time."

Sanlian was never a company that moved lightly when the market shifted. Unlike Su Jing, who could decide on his own to build the Zhiri brand with CITIC, Sanlian had to weigh every decision against an enormous institutional framework. Two things became shackles: a slow decision-making process, and limited budget.

When New Knowledge was founded it had just three text editors — Chen Sai, Lu Jingjing and Yu Lisha — all senior writers or reporters who volunteered to move over from Sanlian Lifeweek at the risk of lower pay. (Their pay went from a monthly "base salary plus contributor fee" to a "base salary plus editing fee" settled every two months; Zhu Wei, Sanlian's editor-in-chief at the time, and Miao Wei agreed to let the editors keep writing for the weekly to offset the drop.) Even as New Knowledge's marketing events multiplied later on, it never hired more marketing staff.

Sanlian traces its origins to Life Bookstore, founded in Shanghai in 1932 by Zou Taofen. In 1951 it was folded into People's Publishing House as a subsidiary imprint. In 2002 it was placed under China Publishing Group, restructured as a corporate entity in 2010, and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of China Publishing & Media Co., Ltd.

Like many traditional media companies, it followed market trends passively without ever working out what they meant for itself. In 2015, New Knowledge released a Kindle edition priced at 1.95 yuan against the print magazine's 20 yuan — an awkward gap.

The MOOK idea was never entirely absent. At the end of 2015 Miao Wei stepped down and Wang Xing, a senior writer at Sanlian Lifeweek, became editor-in-chief. Wang Xing pushed more tightly themed issues, such as Detective Fiction (《侦探小说》) and The New Sapiens (《新智人》). As Yu Lisha saw it, his approach treated New Knowledge as the guidebook to an exhibition, using offline events to give each issue's theme three dimensions.

Through all of 2016, New Knowledge ran one or two salon events for every issue it published, promoted through Songguo Life, Sanlian Lifeweek, and New Knowledge's own WeChat and Weibo accounts. By trading resources, it got small venues at universities and CITIC bookstores. Most events were free, and buying a copy of New Knowledge was the ticket; a few charged 300 yuan or more, mostly to cover drinks.

But experiments like these were never going to work quickly. They changed editorial thinking inside the existing framework; they did not change what the product was.

At the end of 2016, Sanlian launched two internal-startup new-media projects — the lifestyle platform Songguo Life and the tea brand Panda Tea Garden — and began looking for ways to turn content into money. It also set up a subsidiary, Sanlian Lifestyle Media Co., Ltd., and moved Music Lover (《爱乐》), New Knowledge and Sanlian Lifeweek under it. The company pinned its hopes on a paid-knowledge app called Zhongdu, naming it one of 11 main fundraising products and investing nearly 200 million yuan in it.

If you have used it, you'll find the experience unfriendly. Before you can pay for anything you have to buy virtual currency, and buying it is complicated.

The app takes apart the content of every Sanlian magazine, letting readers pay a few yuan to read a single cover story, or 9.9 yuan to subscribe to a favorite Sanlian columnist. It also offers Zhongdu audio courses taught by "knowledge celebrities," and a user-generated "Reader Reactions" feature, among other things.

In February last year, China Publishing & Media released its IPO filing. According to Yu Lisha, once China Publishing Group went public, New Knowledge might be able to "bring about a relaunch" within the framework of the Zhongdu app.

That is the generous way of putting it. The reality may be that because Zhongdu breaks every magazine's content into pieces, the New Knowledge that existed as something with a voice of its own — the one that hoped to be "a liberal-arts magazine for the internet age" — is gone for good.

Cover image and inline images from New Knowledge's Weibo