China: staff at Beijing News on strike following editorial sacking
Staff at the tabloid the Beijing News, "one of China's most outspoken newspapers", began strike action last Thursday in response to the dismissal of editor-in-chief Yang Bin and other senior editors. Additionally, a petition was circulated amongst the paper's staff "denouncing Mr Yang's dismissal and the handover of control to more conservative editors."
The Beijing News has earned its reputation for being outspoken for its "aggressive reporting on corruption and other politically charged issues."
The Chicago Tribune reports that it is unclear exactly how many staff members are involved in the protest and how long it will last. Furthermore, a spokesperson for the paper, who according to the Tribune would only give his surname, Luo, denied any protest was taking place, saying: "Everything here is normal."
However, reports from Beijing indicate that the paper has dropped in size from its normal 80 pages to 32 and senior editorial names are no longer appearing on the masthead.
At a news conference last week Cai Wu of the Chinese government's press office said newspapers "must play their due role to educate and provide proper guidance to the people … They must follow discipline and rules and regulations."
Reporters without Borders has condemned the dismissal of Bin and other editors at the paper and called for their immediate reinstatement: "the Beijing authorities have decided to kill off one of China’s most popular and liberal newspapers. We affirm our solidarity with the staff of the paper … and we call for the reinstatement of the … editors."
New media, in particular blogs, have played a key role in publicising the strike at the Beijing News, and have asserted that Bin and his colleagues were fired because they made the 'political mistake' of agressively covering sensitive issues.
Sources: The Chicago Tribune, Media Guardian, Reporters Without Borders
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John,
I think you've got it backwards. Most newspapers (like most magazines, such as the one I run) don't make our money from supscriptions or direct sales; we make it from advertising (subs are a loss leader that qualify readers so we can charge more for ads). The problem with the Times model is that they charge (a lot) for their archive content, while most of the new stuff is free. If you talk to newspapers that give their older material, such as the Washington Post, they'll tell you that more than 40% of the traffic is coming to stories older that the current day. Obviously the way to make money off that is the same way you make money from the new content: by selling ads against it.
Best,
Chris
This conclusion may work if you're judging online newspapers' current product against the long tail. But I don't think online newspapers can or will continue the content-shoveling forever.
Once news content is organized, synthesized and contextualized in ways that take advantage of the flexibility and interactivity of internet I believe we will see new and multi-layered subscription (and advertising) models that work. Sure, I don't have any numbers on this, but heck, what else are papers going to do?
A great discussion. I agree with Chris and Joe, not with John. The life of the digital news is much more longest than the news of the old media. The long tail works with new ads in old contents. This a new and nearly eternal life to the digital information. I have written a post about this in Periodistas 21 (in spanish).
Best,
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