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From Paidcontent.org:
Reuters Acquires Minority Stake in Chinese Financial Information Portal
Reuters has acquired a minority stake in ChinaWeb, the parent company of Chinese financial information portal Hexun. Founded in 1996, Hexun is now one of China’s largest financial information portals with 50 million monthly unique visitors and 670 million page views per month. Financial terms of the all-cash transaction were not disclosed.
Hexun is part of SEEC, the group that publishes Caijing, everybody's favorite investigative business magazine. This article is from Danwei.org
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Praxis Language, the company behind the popular Chinese learning podcast series Chinesepod, has signed an agreement with the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (or hanban to develop a web strategy for their Confucius Institutes.
You can read more about the deal on Chinesepod founder Ken Carrol's blog. This article is from Danwei.org
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Forbes, the American magazine about getting and staying rich, has been publishing a Chinese edition since 2003.
The glossy monthly magazine is officially published in Hong Kong, but it is aimed at Mainland readers and advertisers. A nod and wink arrangement, common in publishing in China, allows Mainland readers to buy or subscribe to the magazine through the China National Publication Import and Export Group (中国图书进出口(集团)总公司) even though the rag is actually printed inside the borders of the Mainland.
Forbes China (福布斯) is operated by Morningside under a licensing arrangement with Forbes Media. Morningside is an investment company with extensive interests in the Mainland. It is owned by the Hang Lung Group, controlled by Hong Kong brothers Ronnie C. Chan and Gerald L. Chan. (Hang Lung's major business is real estate.) Morningside has made profitable investments in Sohu.com and in outdoor advertising companies in China. They have also invested in Facebook clone Zhanzuo, and in a company called Health Media that puts digital screens bearing advertising in hospitals — Focus Media for the diseased and injured.
Morningside has been struggling for the better part of a decade to make a dime from print magazines. They currently control the Chinese editions of Harvard Business Review, Information Week, and Forbes. But perhaps not for much longer.
There is a rumor about that Forbes Media is not going to renew Morningside's license agreement, which expires in June 2008. IDG, the most successful foreign investor in print media in China, is apparently going to bag either the license for both print and online, or just online initially (i.e. Forbes would keep Morningside on board for print but split the online off). The rumor could just be bluster, but apparently Steve Forbes and IDG head honcho Pat McGovern are old buddies. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Shi Yuzhu and his lucrative MMORPG. The Southern Weekly article on ZT Online, "The System," began to attract attention online even before it was pulled from portals and news websites.
Some readers saw the article as a return to form for the newspaper, while others suspected that it may have been a soft ad bought by Shi Yuzhu's Giant Interactive, the company that runs ZT Online. Giant is currently is working with Southern Weekly on an Olympics-related project.
If it was an ad, then trying to wipe it from the Internet was a neat bit of manipulation: bloggers reacted to what they saw as Giant throwing its weight around by reposting the article in full.
Below are some reactions to "The System" from Chinese bloggers, starting with one blogger's justification for reposting the entire article:
"The System" in Southern Weekly and "the system" in the Chinese media
by maomy / Oh My Media
On 20 December, 2007, Southern Weekly published the lengthy special report, The System that described in depth a shocking story that took place in the online game ZT Online. This was the best, most detailed, most fascinating piece of online gaming journalism I have read in recent years—it was neither a dusty sermon on morality nor a careless broadside of criticism, much less a toadying puff piece. You'll almost certainly fall into deep thought after reading it: millions of people immersed in a land that connects the virtual with the real—what sort of cultural atmosphere is it, what form do the people's actions and thoughts take? What effect does all of this have on so-called real life? Domination, mind manipulation, and desire—such things that rule the virtual and real worlds, when Shi Yuzhu's "Giant Interactive" IPOed in the US, when the mass media was praising yet another fairytale of wealth, can we still permit other voices?
I read the entire text and my first impression was "scary"—particularly the scene of the gamers' mass protests described in the article, where they were screened by the system and even sent to a virtual "Gulag Archipelago." Apparently, the main writer, Cao Yunwu, is a post-80s gamer—that explains it! This is no traditional "balanced" piece of news; it is a special report that stakes a position but speaks the truth as well as possible. It may even be a bit inflammatory, but I like this kind of controlled passion. If you say that what Cao Yunwu presents to us is the horror of the "system" in this "online giant," then what the report itself encountered sends a chill through the heart of the "system" of the Chinese media. Or is the "system" itself to be feared, or is there perhaps some manipulator, interest group, or powerful elite hidden behind the "system"?
I was fortunate enough to read The System when it was reposted on a board of a BBS I frequent, but I was astonished to discover that the document was being scrubbed off the Internet. On Southern Weekly's own website, not only are you unable to find the article in the HTML version of its 20 December, 2007, page, but even in the PDFs provided by the newspaper, "by chance" the two pages are missing (see image).
But just a few days before, Southern Weekly's "Fortune" column ran a report on Shi Yuzhu that grabbed the last fleeting prestige of Giant Interactive's IPO and did its best the play up his capabilities. This article naturally sits unscathed on the webpage for that day, with HTML and PDF versions both present (see image). And if you do a web search, the results cover the pages. In the eyes of industry professionals, does this count as a successful PR puff piece?
On the well-known Chinese gaming BBS, someone mentioned the disappearance of The System, too.
Why is this? It's almost certainly the manipulation of that "invisible hand," doing PR, "harmonizing." As the sensible Guan Jun pointed out, the very composition and publication of this article was already an expression of "wisdom and bravery":
No doubt Shi Yuzhu won't be too pleased when he reads this article. His company just started a cooperative campaign with Southern Weekly, called "Olympic Journey" (奥运征途), sponsoring the paper's visits to former Olympic host cities. On that journey, if it's not dollars, then it's euros—the expenses are not insignificant. The consequences of Shi's displeasure, in my own estimation, will be the flash of a sword, a crack-crack, and the "secKill" of that partnership.
OK, so I've always thought that as the Chinese media becomes commercialized and market-driven, going from kneeling before power to kneeling before money is a natural transition that's as easy as turning over your hand. To any Chinese young person with even a bit of education, news censorship and Internet filtering is not journalism, but when money so easily manipulates a newspaper (and one that's been called China's most stubborn and strong-willed, at that) and BBSs, when "Giant" Naobaijin marketing carries all before it, shouldn't we take a minute to think about responsibility in the "system," in the people behind the "system," and even in ourselves?
With this in mind, I have to break an Internet custom and not simply quote and link to the complete article: I will repost it in its entirety, because you don't know when the article you quoted from and liked to will vanish. The full-text repost will at least remain on my own independent blog and reach 500+ readers—not all that many—through RSS.
Zhao Er, a tech blogger, felt that Southern Weekly had missed the point of online gaming:
Does Southern Weekly not understand online gaming? Or is it manufacturing buzz for ZT Online? On Christmas Even when my friends gathered together, one of them asked me if ZT Online was fun. I answered, I've never played it, so I don't know if it's fun or not. On Christmas night, another friend asked me what the wars in Giant Online were like, and whether its PVP system had any advantages. All of this was kicked up by Southern Weekly's article "The System."
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Southern Weekly doesn't understand gamers. Not all gamers dream of becoming heroes or faction leaders or kings. Many gamers are actually just interested in things they cannot find outside of the game, things like friendship and quiet. A long-time gamer can find in the game not just killing, but many other things as well. The game is merely a platform. If you say that the game is harmful, then the victims bear some of the responsibility.
I was once obsessed with games like 1000 Years and Legend, and during that time of infatuation with online gaming, I really did spend lots of time and money on them, but I still feel that Southern Weekly's article has a few problems, because it's not only Shi Yuzhu's game that's like that—they're all basically like that. Is it only because Shi Yuzhu's famous enough that writing about him will be controversial? Or did they accept an advertising fee from him?
From what transpired, lots of people who've never played ZT Online before are now interested in Shi Yuzhu's game.
Blogger Hecaitou addressed the suggestion that because people were now talking about ZT Online, it must have been bought and paid for:
After Southern Weekly published "The System," I noticed lots of people saying, "Southern Weekly's returned from the dead." At the same time, I also saw many people saying, "I never knew what ZT Online was before, and after reading that article I want to give it a try." Some people even believe that the article was a soft ad that ZT Online placed in Southern Weekly, and indeed, some of my friends said that they'd decided to download it and give it a go because of the article.
I don't think that these friends are singing a different tune from mine; no matter how horrific an anti-drug or anti-AIDS propaganda poster is drawn, there will always be someone who wants a needle after seeing it, or who removes a condom. This is because people are naturally curious, because this curiosity creates innumerable wonders, but also because this curiosity leads countless people onward like a moth drawn to a flame. Someone might ask me, Hecaitou, what's the point of doing that? If you earnestly repost that article, and what is obtained in the end is that sort of outcome, then won't you be sorry?
Why would I be sorry? The Age of the Decline of the Dharma that the Buddha spoke of is the present day; people are extremely clever but lack wisdom. Human thinking has become cunning in the extreme, and can presuppose all kinds of possibilities, sensing potential danger in any affair. Seeing a soft ad in the ZT Online article is an expression of this kind of cleverness; why should I feel sorrow for human evolution?
Hecaitou goes on to make the point that the second try is the one that's important; after curiosity is satisfied, will people return to the game?
Mai Tian, an internet entrepreneur, felt that the true value of the article was in the writing:
My own evaluation of "The System" is that were it not for the fact that the article discusses online gaming, a relatively specialized topic for a small audience, then it would occupy a position in Southern Weekly history alongside the famous "There's always a feeling that brings tears to our eyes" report from back in the day. That is to say, "The System" is not aimed specifically at Shi Yuzhu—it's not even discussing online gaming: "The System" only uses online gaming as subject matter to make a more profound point. "The System" actually is an Internet version of 1984—"the system" is actually "Big Brother."
And finally, Milk Pig offers the following use for the deleted article, in the spirit of ZT Online's "RMB gaming":
If I were Shi Yuzhu, I wouldn't simply pay for deleted posts: I'd buy up Southern Weekly's "The System" article and offer it for sale in the system. For 1,000 yuan you could buy one click to read it online; for 10,000 yuan you could download and save it, and for 100,000 yuan you could repost it and replace "staff reporter" with your own name.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Blocking the sidewalk. For the last seven years, commuters on their way to work in Guiyang have found it hard to buy a morning paper. As part of a campaign to clean up the city's roadways, the capital of Guizhou Province cleared its sidewalks in 2001 and has kept them free of vendors' stalls, including newsstands, ever since.
The decision was not without controversy: were the newsstands any worse than the roving newspaper sellers that sprang up in their place? The Beijing News examined the situation in a lengthy report on Saturday.
Pan Zhijian is the Guizhou provincial secretary of the Zhi Gong party. His retired father reads the newspaper every day. After the newsstands were torn down, his father has to go around to many different places to find a newspaper seller. "Sometimes we'll buy one for him after work, but it's really inconvenient," said Pan.
In the absence of formal newsstands, roving vendors have become the leading force. Liu Jing, who works in the provincial government, said, "It's a real problem when it rains, because we can't find anywhere to buy a newspaper."
In addition, the roving newspaper vendors mainly sell popular newspapers, but Liu Jing likes more specialized, in-depth magazines and weeklies, which are hard to find in many areas.
Guiyang started a project to "return the roads to the people" in 2001. The densely-populated downtown area was crowded and inconvenient, so clearing the sidewalks was a way to ease pedestrian traffic problems:
"After the year 2000, every other step you'd run across something," said Yang Qihua, director of Guiyang's Postal Delivery Office. He recalled that the streets were home to newsstands, bus token changers, rest stations for sanitation workers, and cold-drink vending machines.
In 2001, to control street-side stalls and to eliminate obstacles to pedestrian traffic, Guiyang decided to eliminate of all the installations altogether, including forty-two postal newsstands, "returning the roads to the people."
"The Planning Bureau has always supported the construction of newsstands, but not on the sidewalks," Wei Dingmei, head engineer at the Guiyang Planning Bureau, said decidedly.
She said that in order to return the roads to the people, in addition to not authorizing newsstands built on the sidewalks, the Planning Bureau does not authorize newspaper boards, law propaganda boards or family planning propaganda boards either.
Yang Qihua said that the Post Office has continued to apply for newsstand licenses, submitting over 200 applications and reports to various government departments. But few newsstands were authorized. In 2004, during a national campaign conducted by the Publicity Department and the State Post Bureau to "bring local party newspapers into the marketplace," the municipal party considered setting up six trial newsstands; eventually three were built in heavily-trafficked sections of town.
Debate continued over the next few years; by the end of 2006, the city was leaning toward setting up newsstands in residential areas instead of on crowded thoroughfares; it established seven test sites, bringing the total number of newsstands in the city to 20, serving a population that was nearing 2 million. (Planning Bureau statistics show 77, but that takes into account any location that sells newspapers, whether it is a newsstand or a storefront.)
A proposal in mid-2006 suggested selling newspapers through existing businesses:
In July, 2007, the Planning Bureau issued the Distribution Plan for Newsstands in the Guiyang City Center: "Regarding newsstands operating on the street, we support moving as much business as possible into chain stores, convenience stores, restaurants, hotels, and supermarkets."
"That's easy to say," said Yang Qihua. Yang said that for a sales location on a major road in Guiyang that makes 15,000 yuan in monthly revenue, a marginal profit rate of 28% would leave 4,200 yuan. Taking out a minimum of 1,200 in salary for each of two workers, and water, electricity, sanitation, and other fees, there would be just 1,600 left.
According to a survey by the Post Bureau, the monthly rent of a first-floor location in a building along a major road in Guiyang runs up to 500 yuan per square meter. A newsstand that occupies ten square meters would owe 5,000 yuan a month in rent.
That means that gross profits are not enough to cover rent. If a newsstand is set up off the main drag, then even though rent will be cheaper, sales will drop while operating costs will remain the same.
In addition, the newsstands already licensed to operate in a few neighborhoods are not permitted to sell beverages or to run public telephones.
 An ad-hoc newsstand in Guiyang. Situated in the mountains, Guiyang may be unable to satisfy the demands of its growing population by expanding outwards in the manner of other cities; in this respect, its desire to keep the downtown free from obstructions is understandable.
But commentators in the Chinese media took issue with the explanation given by the city's chengguan (urban administration) that the removal of streetside vendors was also intended to be part of city beautification.
At Rednet, Ma Erli lamented the inconveniences that chengguan impose on the public:
Our city is like an overnight millionaire who dresses in famous-brand clothing but lacks sophistication; his mobile phone is encrusted with diamonds, but you cannot find a pen anywhere on his person. The plight of the newsstands is like the millionaire's pen - it doesn't matter if it is there or not. Actually, Guiyang is not the only city where newsstands are in limbo; the phenomenon is repeated in many cities across the country. Before the road I live on was widened, it had a newsstand covering three square meters that had stood there for decades. When the road was widened, the sidewalk was widened too, and it was even greenified. But the newsstand was carried off by the chengguan. From then on I had to walk a long way to buy a newspaper.
There is no doubt that this is the the ultimate result of the "great unification" of the chengguan. They do not consider the history of the newsstand or the layout of the newspaper sales network, nor do they consider whether or not it is convenient for consumers to buy newspapers. The administrative accomplishment of "no vendors on the roadway" is the ultimate goal of the chengguan.
And everything can be swept away like autumn leaves when this ultimate goal exists. However, urban management clashes with cultural consumption; is it merely the residents' loss when such a large city cannot find room for a three-square-meter newsstand? A city that does not permit newsstands, a city that provides no facilities for culture is a city that is unbearably snobbish - a city that won't have much of a future.
Junjun, writing in the Qianjiang Evening News, accused the chengguan of taking the easy way out:
In typical urban administration thinking, there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the "will of the officials" and the "will of the people"; between the government's "face" and the people's "stomach."
Tearing down all newsstands on the sidewalk in order to "return the roads to the people" seems to be something of an overcorrection. What someone familiar with the urban management administration said seems more likely to be the true face of the situation: roadside vendors affect the beauty and fluidity of a city; if newsstands are authorized, then other vendors will descend on the road too, and they'll be difficult to eradicate.
Evidently, eliminating newsstands is not purely for the cause of "returning the roads to the people"; the "fear" that practically all urban administrators share is exposed: a "fear" that roadside vendors will affect the "face" of the city; a "fear" that too many roadside vendors will increase the difficulty of managing them. To reduce the management "headaches," why not simply get rid of them all at one stroke?
There's no question that sweeping away all stalls, including newsstands, can make a city look especially bright and orderly, and it can let the city administrators relax. But "small vendors and small businessmen are treasures, too," as the slogan of the Urumqi chengguan once went: in today's tight job market, these stalls are related to the "rice-bowls" and "stomachs" of a fairly large, vulnerable population. The elimination of those stalls covers over more difficulties in the people's livelihood. When the administrators tear down in the name of "the people's convenience," they cannot escape "inconveniencing the people; tearing down the newsstands "stopped up" one of the channels through which the city's residents satisfy their cultural demands.
A city cannot be free of order, but neither can it have nothing but lifeless order. The best standard for testing the measures implemented by the city administrators ought to be the will of the people.
And a letter to the Beijing Youth Daily suggested that the Guiyang city officials were starting off from mistaken assumptions: highly-developed, beautiful cities like Shenzhen and Beijing are covered with newsstands, but no one complains that they are detrimental to the image of those cities.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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Zeng Pengyu, managing editor at Beijing Youth Daily, writes in a recent blog post of some experiences he's had with reporters who aren't as conscientious as they could be:
Sketchy Reporters
by Zeng Pengyu
In the past I found it pretty hard to stomach other people saying bad things about reporters: I thought that it was no different from them saying things about me. So I'd often get into arguments. But later, when I encountered some of my colleagues while wearing a different hat, I gradually discovered that there really are lots of sketchy individuals and affairs in this profession.
A few days ago, a large quantity of everyday garbage was for some unknown reason dumped at on the grass at the entrance to our community. No one know who dumped it at the gate or at what time it was dumped, and the writing on the packing material and torn plastic bags was all in a foreign language. Everyone was extremely puzzled. While looking for the sanitation people, someone probably called up a newspaper tip line.
That was when I came home, where I found lots of people surrounding the gate, so I went up to have a look. I saw an old woman from the community being interviewed by a certain newspaper. The young reporter, who looked about 24 or 25, asked the old woman, "When did you find this pile of garbage?" The old woman said, "I go out for a walk every day, and today when I went out I saw it. There was this pile of garbage on the nice green space, really affecting the environment. Usually there's a sanitation truck that goes by here...."
The reporter asked, "So then you gave the government a call?" The old woman paused. "No, I didn't make any calls. I just thought it was odd...." The reporter said, "If you didn't call the government, then how do you know that this pile of garbage wasn't dumped here by the sanitation department on purpose..." The old woman began to be less sure of herself: "....it's not really clear. But who in their right mind would dump garbage here...."
After exchanging a few more words, the reporter left without even entering the community. Afterward, I began to pay attention to that newspaper; on the third day, I noticed the report. The headline read, "Foreign Garbage Stuns City," and the text went along these lines: "...The sudden appearance of a pile of foreign garbage in a neighborhood near Chaoyang Park caught the attention of most residents. One old woman who often goes out for walks told the reporter that she usually sees sanitation trucks pass by, but she wasn't sure why the sanitation department had not taken away this pile of foreign garbage...." I read the article twice, but I couldn't figure out what the reporter was saying, or where the foreign garbage had come from, or why it had appeared at the gate of the community—why had the reporter even gone there? He left without finding out anything, and then wrote an article in which nothing was clear....
In the evening, Beijing TV broadcast the same news item. It turned out that the sanitation department had been clearing out everyday garbage from the Dongzhimen embassy district that evening, and on its way to the disposal plant, it had gotten into an accident at the gate to the community; the garbage had fallen out onto the roadside. The crashed truck had been towed away, but the sanitation department was temporarily unable to sent any other truck over to haul away the garbage. It had to leave it at the side of the road, but it also left a notice. The notice board was later removed by some unknown person, and as a result, the residents argued over it....two minutes of news cleared up the whole matter. After I watched it I thought really must be easy being a reporter for that newspaper. You can earn your work points without thinking or making any effort. Heh, there'll eventually be trouble if things go on like that.
But reporters are people, too. Reporters have the same sorts of bad habits that common people have, like laziness, taking shortcuts, showing off, and so forth. When they are exposed, it becomes a joke.
In 2001, shortly after Beijing's successful Olympics bid, the Universiade was held in Beijing. At the time, I was pulled to be a reporter at the games. Not long after the opening ceremony, the American delegation and the Universiade committee held a press conference. Because there were many officials there from the American sports world, the host introduced them in English. Let me say in passing that the host, W, who was already older than sixty at the time, had excellent English. He was one of the officials tapped for the Olympics bid.
Afterward he opened the floor to questions. Typically, a large-scale session of this sort would have simultaneous translation; questions can be asked in one's mother tongue, and after they are translated the opposite party can respond immediately. You'll hear the Chinese version of the answer in your earphones. So the first few questions went very smoothly. Then one young man stood up and, very pleased with himself, gave his introduction in English: "I am a reporter with XX, my question is..." and then he asked his question in English. Listeners could tell that he had majored in English, but perhaps because he was nervous—that day's press conference was held in the main hall and had a large attendance—the more he spoke the more confused I became. At the end, I had no idea what he was trying to say.
I expect that the people sitting around me had the same impression. People became restless. The guy probably wanted to show off a little, but then got confused; the more confused he was, the more jumbled his words became. He spoke for at least a minute, but no one knew what it was he was asking.
Finally W, the moderator, could no longer take it and cut him off: "Could you ask your question in Chinese?" The reporter's face turned red, but he still tried to continue in English. W cut him off again, this time not as politely: "I'm sorry, I see that you have a decent level of English, but we want to understand your question. Please ask it in Chinese."
The guy had to switch to Chinese, and in two seconds we understood what he meant.
Even though many years have passed, I still recall that episode. Everyone has their strengths, but every profession has its peculiarities. Sometimes, when you substitute your strengths for those peculiarities, they can easily become deficiencies.
The past two years I haven't worked as a reporter, but I have gained a much deeper understanding and appreciation of the profession. I also frequently run across slightly sketchy affairs. For example, I've been interviewed by a number of media outlets in regard to financial topics, two of which made a particular impression on me. One was a young woman who had just entered the profession. She took vacation time to travel from far off to do an interview. She was fully prepared and the resulting article was clear and understandable. The second was also a young woman who had found me through someone else. She arranged a time but then didn't follow up. Later, I found her online, and she said that she had seen my blog, which she felt had all the information she needed for an "interview." No need to meet in person; she could just write up an article from the material on the blog.
I thought it over and then agreed, with the one request that she let me read the manuscript after she finished it. When the manuscript arrived, although it was all taken from blog posts, although it had been edited to look like a face-to-face interview, and although there were no errors, to a reader it seemed like it was lacking something—there was no spark.
Later, I grew to understand why certain interview subjects have such a poor impression of reporters. Bait-and-switch tactics and lack of preparation occur quite frequently in this profession, and many people feel that those are the keys to success. But they actually show disrespect to others and an underestimation of oneself. I predict that those two young women will travel utterly different roads in the future.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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This is an Internet rumor and so should be taken with a large grain of salt, but this Chinese blog is saying that the confession by the cardboard baozi journalist only happened after the journalist had been beaten to a pulp.
For background to the case see ESWN — Why Do People Think That A Fake News Story Is Real?, and Danwei — Is the fake news story fake news?.
UPDATE: Tomorrow, almost today, is August 8, the start of the one year countdown to the commencement of the 2008 Olympic Games.
In honor of this date, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Sans Frontières, and the Foreign Correspondents Club of China have all released reports and held press conferences to tell the world that foreign reporters continue to be hassled and the local media still is not free.
Many of your correspondent's Chinese friends think that the organizations listed above are just silly, trouble-making foreigners who don't really get it.
On the other hand, those same people don't know whether to believe the government line or the apparently fake news item about the cardboard baozi — which even if fake, has the the ring of truth.
All of which underlines the reality of the severe crisis of trust in China today. Who can we believe? Who will tell the truth? The government? The media, Chinese or foreign? NGOs?
Many Chinese people, and a lot of Westerners who observe China, will turn to certain bloggers, certain news agencies and newspapers, certain magazines, and certain editors, public intellectuals and writers.
Smart media companies in China will latch on the this phenomenon: people are starting to need accurate information and informed opinion. Whoever can deliver accurate facts and consistently trustworthy opinion will win the long war in China, even if many short term battles are lost.
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Billsdue bloh has translated some interesting news about the animation industry in a post titled 'Caijing On Foreign Investment In China's Entertainment Industry'. Excerpt:
Among the interesting tidbits mentioned is that Sequoia China has apparently closed up to a $10M investment into Polybona (保利博纳. Variety backgrounder), one of China's largest private film distribution companies.
In addition, the article mentions that Sequoia China investee Great Dreams Cartoons (宏梦卡通) is discussing a merger with Sunchime Cartoons (三辰卡通). In fact, according to the CEO of Great Dreams, Wang Hong (王宏), there may be a merger underway of the top three animation companies (one an animation channel) in Hunan Province--Great Dreams, Sinchime and Aniworld (金鹰卡通) to create an animation powerhouse.
Sequoia China is the Chinese investment vehicle of the famous Silicon valley VC firm that was an early investor in Google and Youtube.
Read the whole thing on Billsdue (proxy link for people in China), or see the original Chinese article is on Caijing's website.
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Found via Mind Meters, the Youtube video below is titled Prometeus - The Media Revolution. It's a faux documentary look back at a new media revolution, seen from the year 2050 or so. It was made by an Italian company that does consulting work in social media and other trendy stuff, and the narrator has a pleasant Italian accent.
The video includes this prediction:
The media arena is less and less populated. Only the Tyrannosaurus Rex survives. The Net includes and unifies all the content. Google buys Microsoft. Amazon buys Yahoo! and become the world universal content leaders with BBC, CNN and CCTV.
(Emphasis added)
If you liked Prometeus - The Media Revolution, you might also enjoy a video that was going round the Internet in 2004, before Youtube had even launched, called 2014 EPIC, by Google.
In a similar vein but strictly fact-based, The Machine is Us/ing Us elegantly explains the meaning of Web 2.0 means in five minutes.
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Coming to a newsstand near you on Thursday The profile of Rupert Murdoch's wife Deng Wendi that was spiked by the editors of Australian newspaper Good Weekend is to be published in Chinese news magazine New Century Weekly (新世纪周刊) this Thursday.
The article has already appeared in English in Australia's The Monthly. It was also supposed to appear in the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper later this month, but was spiked for unknown reasons.
The cover of the upcoming issue is reproduced here. You can see more of the soon to be published Chinese language article on Ping Ke's blog: This Unusual Woman. You can see more of the author Eric Ellis' work at his personal website.
When Chinese magazines start publishing articles that scare off Western editors, you know the times they are a changing.
Links and Sources
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Last May China hosted the 36th FIPP World Magazine Conference in Beijing.
FIPP stands for International Federation of the Periodical Press, an organization that inlcudes 255 members in 57 countries worldwide, and that represents 110,000 magazine titles with an estimated annual advertising expenditure of US$70 billion. Recently, magazine.org, the website of the Magazine Publishers of America has posted an exhaustive report on the Conference (see below for a link to the report). It is an entertaining read for those interested in the magazine publishing business in China.
Links and Sources
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 Xu Jinglei at the launch of her e-magazine in April this year — thinking about the numbers? Circulation and viewership statistics for China's media industry ado not come from the reality-based community: most publishers simply make up the numbers.
Today Fang Jun on the excellent group blog Mind Meters published an article about the figures currently being tossed about by China's e-magazine industry. The article is roughly translated below.
Note: In China e-magazines (电子杂志) refers to electronic magazines that are downloaded and then viewed by turning virtual pages, sometimes containing multimedia content.
The weasel math of e-magazines
by Fang Jun
E-magazines often say that they have several million readers. For example, Xu Jinglei's Kai La magazine claims that it has been downloaded 3 million times.
I have always been a bit doubtful; I know that figures for circulation of media in China have always been grossly exaggerated. The usual practice is to divide a newspaper's stated circulation numbers by two or three, and to divide a magazine's stated circulation numbers by five to ten.
In the bubble of e-magazines, how do we derive the real circulation numbers? Do we divide the stated numbers by ten or by 100?
I am very curious about this so I have asked many people about the circulation numbers for e-magazines, but as you can imagine, this is an industry secret, and it's very difficult to get at the truth. But guesstimating from the information I got hold of, in general you can say that dividing the stated numbers by ten is not nearly enough because e-magazines use what Dilbert calls 'weasel math'.
What is weasel math? Here are two examples:
For example, more than three people visit the California Flannel Pocket Museum every year, but you could say that the museum is in a state that attracts more than 12 million visitors a year.
And how does a new cable TV station tell people how many viewers it has? Well, they will tell guests to their talk shows that '25 million people can watch you on this show'.
According to data from the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, three big e-magazine platforms have released these figures: xplus says they have 11 million users, ZCOM says more than 20 million, and POCO says they have more than 40 million. Without even mentioning that how these figures are padded, the statistics are quite clearly exaggerated: anyone who has downloaded their e-magazine reader software even once is counted as a user even if the person never uses the software again.
To speak specifically of individual e-magazines, generally they use this calculation: e-magazine platforms that offers several different publications for download usually use 'push' technology, so a certain proportion of all the users becomes the figure for an individual magazine's 'readership'. But how many people download the magazine of their own initiative? How many people actually read the magazine? Nobody knows these figures. Of the stated three million readers of 'Kai La', how many people actually read the magazine? 300,000? 100,000? Or 30,000?
iResearch [an Internet research firm] has figures about e-magazines, but they are also calculated using weasel math. For example, one of their reports in 2007 predicted that 30 to 40% of all Internet users in China were e-magazine users based on the 'user numbers', so the figures are huge. You know, there are already more than 140 million Internet users in China, and this figure is set to increase many times in the next few years.
(Note: Industry insiders are welcome to submit their calculation methods for readership numbers. Thanks.)
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