The demise of the NVR or News Views Review has been sparking off more discussions than it did during its rather short lifetime. I'm probably not the best one to comment on the paper, since I did notice it, but never felt inclined to buy it.
The comments by Danwei did put NVR ones again on my radar screen. Shanghaiist does a good job in summerizing the fall-out of those comments.
In the stream of rumors the names of other magazines are said to be in trouble, although Danwei thinks that Beijing is doing a rather better job in getting English language media out than Shanghai.
Obvious most magazines in Shanghai have been catering better for the needs of the advertisers than for the needs of their audiences. Are the advertisers becoming smarter by discovering that they might not get as much value as they pay for? That would be news, since in this country where there is no decent way of monitoring the performance of any print media, including the Chinese ones, advertisers just had to go for the biased assumptions they got from the publisher and their sales people.
Under the new rules of the new media other rules work the key question is whether you are part of a conversation. Are people quoting you? Are people commenting on your work, are you getting links to your stories and entries, how are you doing in the search engines. Media organizations who do not have a serious online operation, like the English channel of the Shanghai Media Group or the South China Morning Post, can be certain they will lose the battle for the reader, but otherwise none of the directions the new media take are very sure.
Being part of a conversation does not automatically mean you also get the revenue from advertisers. But without that conversation, you might just disappear without being noticed.
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