The Standard, for ages the number two English language daily in Hong Kong, will be available for free from Monday, it announced today. The move is likely going to change the media landscape in Hong Kong.
The South China Morning Post has been a highly-profitable quasi-monopolist, relatively unhurt by the internet, although Hong Kong is one of the world's best wired places. But because of its relative small surface and good services, internet-based initiative, including media, did not make the impact it is making on the mainland.
With a mature free newspaper on the market, that is likely to change, especially in a city where sales are based on street vendors rather than subscriptions. The South China Morning Post has in the past decade mainly focused on cutting costs, since whatever quality they would deliver, there was anyway no competition. That might now change.
Free newspapers have a big impact wherever they show up. In Shanghai print readership in the subways is almost limited to the free paper that is handed out four days of the week.
2 comments:
Sorry Fons. I think you're completely wrong on this one.
Free newspapers are important in Hong Kong in the local language - Chinese.
Newsstand sales are relatively irrelevant to the SCMP which gets delivered to most international businesses and a huge number of expat and local professional households as a subscription product.
The Standard has been a marginal business proposition for years. The HK Government's decision to allow publicly-listed companies to dispense with the need to publish their huge official announcements in one English and one Chinese newspaper was a huge nail in the paper's coffin.
Most of its circulation was, as far as I can tell, given away anyway. So, this isn't going to make much difference. It's lost its real revenue base: the official ads. And nothing is going to make up for that. The English job ads will stay in the SCMP.
Give it 9 months. The Standard is almost finished. And that's sad; it has a long and proud history in Hong Kong although recent years have not been kind to it.
Thanks for the correction. I should leave Hong Kong alone anyway.
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