The market for English language publications in China (and elsewhere)

No longer managing
via WikipediaWhen the then-famous magazine Asiaweek was taken out of the market in 2001 people - especially those involved in making the magazine, like I was - were shocked. How could AOL/Time Warner take a reputed weekly, with a solid subscriber-basis and next to the Far Eastern Economic Review the second in the market for English-language weeklies in Asia, out of that market overnight?
Asiaweek did not match the financial standards for return on investment set during this major corporate screw-up, when an overfunded AOL bought under-performing Time-Warner, and it was over for Asiaweek before the AOL/Time Warner deal itself did not seem such a smart idea after all.
Since then the signals have been pointing south for many other publications too. The Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) was reduced to a monthly, that is not making a difference anymore. The once-leading South China Morning Post (SCMP) has reduced itself from a regional force to a local newspaper for Hong Kong, still making a profit, but like newspapers worldwide, on its way down.
The financial news wire Xinhua Finance got launched in 2003 and listed, offering its founders at least their return on investments, but seems now a smallish operation that has diversified so much from its original clear business model, it seems to do everything apart from being a news wire with a China focus.
More than one Hong Kong tycoon, most recently Richard Li, has been looking at ways to reenter this market with a new venture trying to address this market. The Chinese magazine Caijing and Richard Li recently retained New York Times celebrity journalist Craig Smith who resigned his job in leading the Tokyo office for the newspaper to join this operation.
Richard Li, rooted in a firm tradition of the second-generation Hong Kong tycoons, only has to spend money, not make it, and for any journalist - like we are used to prostituting ourselves to anybody who is willing to pay our expenses - an ambitious tycoon is too nice to refuse.
Both the China Daily and the Shanghai Daily have been trying to become a leading publication, but we knew - and seemed to have been proven right - that governments are not well equipped to publish successful media.

Especially in the case of the South China Morning Post there have been made very strong cases for a few alternative explanations for this leading English newspaper in Hong Kong to withdraw to its home base, waiting for the unavoidable demise that has his already hit some many other leading ventures in the newspaper industry.
One explanation, the conspiracy theory, argued that the central government has urged the owners, the Kuok family, to stay in Hong Kong and not bother with the mainland, so the China Daily could hold onto this market. The other - a favorite among journalists - argued that the management had no clue. Journalists often perceive themselves as smarter than their management and like to say that too.

After looking at all these changes and initiatives, there is only one, rather irrelevant question that remains: is there a market for English language magazines and newspapers? Irrelevant, since the illusion of a market is often enough to get us going. But is there a market?
The 20th century habit of smearing ink on dead tree and then ship them to customers in the region has become rather obsolete, regardless whether you do this on a daily, a weekly or a montly basis. This habit persisted, although the audiences moved online, because most money was still in the print media, because not only journalists but also ad people had big trouble in coming to terms with this new reality.
But the ad money is shifting now, although all stakeholders are still very busy in finding new ways of getting to customers, now the traditional media are losing their audiences. Finding new ways has become more urgent than ever.
My feeling: the potential customer base is too divide and the technology allows to service this multitude of customer bases, the time for leading media is over. Forming lose networks between those different bases is the only way forward, for potential opinion leaders, for companies selling their products and services, and for governments trying to get to different constituencies. Conversation will be the new tool, replacing print.