From the EastSouthWestNorth blog (link):
At the January 12th “Innovations and Developments in Newspaper Enterprises” forum in Guangzhou, the Jiefang Daily group made a proposal to the 39 party newspaper groups in the country: Let us form a national newspaper content alliance and raise the threshold for Internet re-publishing in order to protect our intellectual property rights. In a speech, Jiefang Daily group party secretary Yin Minghua said in a slightly angry tone: “It costs tens of millions of RMB to gather the news for a general-purpose newspaper. But when we give our quality information to the Internet media, we get only a symbolic payment of several tens of thousands of RMB.”
The Chinese print media have been handling over the news that they gathered to the Internet media (especially the major Internet portals that featured news) almost for free. This is something that the industry knows about . This situation started when the Internet came around and it has continued unchanged to now. The situation is completely different in the United States, where traditional media and the Internet are both well-developed. The two major American portals Yahoo! and AOL have to spend a lot of money to get the news products. Many American media people think that the Chinese traditional media are stupid to be doing what they do.
According to research conducted by the China Renmin University Media Management Research Institute, the total revenue of the newspaper industry in the first half of last year was falling. The advertising revenue fell between 10% to 30%, with some newspapers falling by more than 40%. On August 26, 2005, Beijing Youth Media announced a net profit of 170,000 RMB for the first half of the year, which was a 99.7% drop compared to the 66.309 million RMB for the same period last year. The media were in an uproar. Previously, in the past 20 years, its advertising revenue had been growing by an average of 33% per annum.
