Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Xinmin evening news: Watching a bridge move
Micah Sittig at Shanghaiist points at this major online event: the Xinmin evening news bringing the moving of the first half former Garden Bridge (Waibaidu in Chinese) in Shanghai. Tomorrow the landmark bridge at Shanghai's Bund will be moved to Pudong for repairs and the site will be showing the operation live, tomorrow.
That in itself is already a nice service for people like me who have crossed the bridge hundreds of times, but it shows also that the old Xinmin evening news, once one of China's leading papers in terms of circulation, is busy to reinvent itself online.
I have been writing about the way down hilll in 2005, when its circulation of two million, down from three million and fast sinking. While all newspapers had the same cover and major political pages, the Xinmin evening news was a huge success by focusing on social news and had a very good reputation. In 2007 the paper announced it was going digital and while that would be an inevitable road for any newspaper nowadays, rumors from the editorial desks were not really that upbeat.
Reason enough to have a watch at their operation tomorrow.
Update: Just compared both the Xinmin evening news and the People's Daily at Alexa.com. That website is notoriously bad for Chinese websites and the Alexa toolbar to measure traffic is in China even considered to be malware. But for comparing Chinese sites, we could use the tool. I just figured out that Xinmin Evening News is a newcomer at the scene, first picked up in January and actually spiking in the past few weeks. Although its traffic is still nothing compared to the People's Daily, the recent performance looks pretty interesting.
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