Peninsula Metropolis Daily
August 6, 2008
Today's Peninsula Metropolis Daily, a daily newspaper whose distribution is limited to Qingdao, a coastal city in Shandong Province, ran a big headline celebrating the newspaper's recent ascent to "the 55th strongest newspaper of the world".
The headline ("strongest") is a little misleading because the ranking mentioned is based only on circulation number which gives the papers in populous countries like India and China an edge and enables the boring and unread People's Daily to easily beat any American newspaper.
The ranking is allegedly from a report recently released by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN). Previously, Danwei reported on the WAN ranking of 2005: Reference News (参考消息) was ranked eighth newspaper worldwide in terms of circulation, while the People's Daily came in ninth.
The statistics quoted by the Peninsula Metropolis shows that the Reference News has moved ahead to the fifth place, while The People's Daily is still number nine.
Beijing's newspapers fared badly in the rankings. Despite the city's constant boast that it has a more educated population than any other city, the only Beijing newspaper on the list is Beijing Evening News, which ranked 72, behind many other Chinese regional newspapers.
According to the list, the top Chinese regional newspaper in term of circulation is the Nanjing basedYangze Evening News ranking 21th, followed by three Guangzhou-based newspapers: Guangzhou Daily, Information Times, and New Express.
Although Danwei could not confirm the authenticity of the ranking, several blunders make the article seem less than trustworthy: There is no way that one newspaper the New York Times could appear on the same list twice, but it does, at 45th and 93th place.
Southern Metropolis Daily, ranked 29th in 2005, has totally disappeared from this year's top 100 as reported in the Peninsula Metropolis article.
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Posted
Aug 06 2008, 04:22 AM
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Danwei - Media, Advertising, and Urban Life in China