The last-ever issue of an influential Guangzhou-based sports
newspaper, Nanfang Sports, rolled off the presses
yesterday.
That day's Star Daily, an entertainment
newspaper published in Beijing, reported that in future the
five-year-old sports paper will be absorbed as a weekly supplement
of Nanfang Metropolis Daily.
In a telephone interview with Star Daily on
Monday, Gong Xiaoyue, the sports paper's editor-in-chief, admitted
that his paper was defeated by competition from the internet and
coverage in more comprehensive newspapers.
Nanfang Sports began on March 17, 2000 and
has since become a quite influential sports paper.
"We didn't fully realize our problem until five
months ago when we began to change the original biweekly paper to a
weekly. But it was too late," said Gong.
"The emerging internet in China is more convenient
for speedy and continuous information," he said. "As a paper
specializing in sports, we should have made strategic changes much
earlier, focusing on in-depth analyses instead of only providing
'real-time' reports."
"We have accumulated a wealth of experience and
brought forth new ideas in sports coverage. However, I must admit
that we failed in making a profit," he said.
There is a long list of sporting newspapers that
have closed in recent years, including Qiubao, 21st
Century Sports, Sports Express, Sports Times and
Sports Herald.
21st Century Sports, a Sichuan-based
weekly, only ran for half a year before it stopped on September 28,
2002. During that time, the newspaper office invested an average of
over 800,000 yuan a month, but the paper remained unprofitable.
There are still many others feeling the pinch.
Sports Youth started publication on March 6,
2000, with Bi Xidong, a senior sports reporter and famous soccer
critic, as editor-in-chief.
Beijing's only sports paper, it has focused on
covering the games of Beijing Hyundai, a local team in the China
Super League (CSL). As the team's results got steadily worse, the
weekly also lost circulation, and last month Bi was transferred
from the paper.
"They didn't sign working contracts with us," an
employee of the paper complained on condition of anonymity. "We
have no insurance, and often suffer from payments in arrears.
Sometimes we even have to go out for interviews on our own
expenses."
Yang Ming, a senior Xinhua sports reporter,
attributed the deaths of Nanfang Sports and others to
longstanding ferocious competition. "Along with the marketization
of basketball and soccer, a large number of sporting newspapers
have emerged. Over the years rivals have cut the ground from under
each other's feet."
Yang said one way they had done this was to use
inflated wages to poach talent from each other, and that they were
now paying for it.
According to Jin Shan, director of the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences' Culture and Sports Research Center, in
recent years fake reports and scandals have flooded sporting
newspapers, turning readers off. Meanwhile, more and more dailies
have three to four pages of sports news, which has been very
attractive to ordinary readers.
Song Jianwu, director of the Media Management
Institute at Renmin
University of China, thought the current situation was
inevitable, and that "as a few media companies take most market
shares, others are bound to perish."
A more stable situation and straightforward
competition is expected after the current reshuffle. "Choosing to
withdraw at this moment, as Nanfang Sports did, may well
have been the smartest thing to do," Song said.
However, on August 8 a new sporting paper,
Yangtze Sports, began publication in Jiangsu
Province.
Its editor-in-chief, Chen Jianjun, is ambitious:
"We shall not be affected by the closure of Nanfang Sports.
This October's 10th National Games in Jiangsu, next year's World
Cup in Germany and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games will create
perfect opportunities for us to develop."
(China.org.cn by Shao Da, August 31, 2005)