Good old daysvia WikipediaI just received through my rss-reader a link to a good story by Paul Midler at the China Game where he explains that profitability is not the only way for companies in China to survive. You can read that yourself, but I was intrigued by his opening:
Far Eastern Economic Review published an article of mine in March 2008, wanted to introduce the piece here. For those less familiar with Far Eastern Economic Review, it is one of Asia’s leading business publications, and it shares an association with the Wall Street Journal.Why did I not pick the story up in March, when it was published two months ago? One thing that spring to my mind is that the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) is perhaps less leading today compared to the 1990s when I subcribed to the magazine.
In those days it was a leading magazine, together with Asiaweek, its major competitor and the South China Morning Post (SCMP) you had to read those publications, to know what was happening in Asia and especially China. All three have lost that position, largely because they have been unable to follow the move of their audiences to the internet. Print media used to have a possibility to keep their audience - I think FEER lost that possibility when it changed from w eekly into a monthly, while the pace in China was picking up.
So, now poor authors like Paul Midler have to publish their articles on their own weblog, before they are even noticed. Asiaweek is already gone, it will be a matter of time before we might read - if we notice it - that also FEER has passed away.
6 comments:
Far Eastern Economic Review would be more widely read if it were made available for free. There is no doubt about it. At $120, the yearly subscription fee puts the publication out of reach for some. At the same time, people do read the publication, and they consistently put out thought-provoking pieces on the region. And despite the fees, they do have a readership. If the issue of "free" is an interesting one, you may want to see an article written for Wired. Makes a compelling case for why charging nothing is a good business strategy...
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
Maybe I would be milder if I were living in Hong Kong, where you can get the FEER and the SCMP the same day fairly cheaply. In China, they do not play a role in the ongoing discussions and so the qualification "leading" is not valid anymore. Piece might be in potential thought-provoking, but that does not help if they are not read. Would be a nice subject for an academic study: the English-language market today in Asia.
I would agree with you, except I just saw in the Asian WSJ the other day that FEER is going to be free for a while and I get the strong sense good ole Rupert is going to try to revive it on the net, big time.
Making FEER free would indeed be the only way forward. It would give it an advantage over all the print-magazines without online presence or behind a firewall.
Just wondering... I thought that the FEER was, since its (almost) bankruptcy and (almost) closure a few years ago, only reborn online, and not on paper, but maybe I am wrong ? (I have lost track of its evolutions anyway ...even if I was a subscriber of this interesting very weekly in the 1990's in Hong Kong and later on in Europe)
I just learned through Facebook that the FEER does have a print-edition.
Post a Comment