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Original zhaobaoquan communication

In the second decade of 21st century, the decline of China’s paper media has lasted for seven years, and the decline of the world’s paper media has lasted for ten years. Every year, a large number of newspapers in China are closed down or changed into electronic editions, and a large number of newspapers are stubbornly making breakthroughs in transformation and carrying out reform iterations. Where is the direction of newspaper transformation? The author believes that the paper media should carefully analyze the media ecology it faces and find the direction of transformation and development in order to achieve a breakthrough in transformation.

First, the origin of the theory of newspaper extinction

2009 is a watershed in the development of global newspaper industry.

Since 2009, European and American newspapers have fallen sharply, and hundreds of newspapers or magazines in the United States have been forced to close or turn into electronic editions. Christian Science Monitor, a century-old newspaper founded in 1908, announced the closure of the paper edition in April 2009; Reader’s Digest, which was founded in 1922 and had a circulation of 17 million copies, filed for bankruptcy protection in August 2009. The 27-year-old French Chinese-language newspaper "European Daily" announced that it would be closed on August 31, 2009.

In fact, the topic of "the death of newspapers" originated in the 1990s. In 1994, American futurist Michael Crichton called newspapers "media dinosaurs". Howard Kurtz, a media critic in Washington Post, called the newspaper industry a "smell of death".

In the 21st century, the death of daily newspapers even has a clear forecast time. In 2005, Philip Meyer, a professor at the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina in the United States, predicted the future of daily newspapers in the book "Disappearing Newspapers: How to Save Newspapers in the Information Age": By 2015, the trend line of readers’ confidence in newspapers will reach zero. If this trend line is extended, the readers of daily newspapers will return to zero by the end of the first quarter of 2043. This is the origin of the widely quoted prediction that one day in 2043, the last daily reader will check out and leave.

In 2008, Professor Philip Meyer published the article "Elite Newspapers of the Future" in the American News Review, which revised the previous prediction and proposed that "the number of daily newspaper readers will decline more sharply" and "the last reader who reads newspapers every day will disappear earlier than October 2043."

Just as the newspapers and periodicals in Europe and the United States issued a death cry, the newspapers in China were doing their last carnival in a climax, and the journalists in China didn’t feel or felt or didn’t want to believe that the cold winter was coming.

The newspaper industry in China began to decline in 2012, and the advertisements of urban newspapers began to decline in half every year in 2013. In 2014, the biggest news in the newspaper industry was that Shanghai Evening News was closed for business reasons. In 2016, two landmark urban newspapers, Oriental Morning Post in Shanghai and Jinghua Times in Beijing, closed.

In the past five or six years, the tide of newspaper closure has been going on, and at the end of the year and the beginning of the year, news of newspaper closure will come. Around New Year’s Day in 2019, about 20 newspapers in the country stopped publishing. In 2020, there are still a number of newspapers that have announced their closure, namely Wuhan Morning Post, City Express (Tianjin), Tianfu Morning Post, Zigong Evening News, Benxi Evening News, Qidu Morning News (Wenshan, Yunnan), Life Daily (Shandong), Ji ‘an Evening News (Jiangxi), Lhasa Evening News, etc.

In the last two years, most of the newspapers that stopped publishing were urban newspapers in provincial capitals, and the development trend of newspapers obviously formed a pattern of "one party for one night" in provincial and big cities. Most of the newspapers that stopped publishing in prefecture-level cities were evening newspapers run by local party newspapers, which made second-and third-tier cities form a "one newspaper mode" that only kept daily newspapers. This shows that the reading rate of newspapers has dropped sharply and the living space has shrunk further.

Second, the era of technology "kidnapping" civilization

The survival and development of any species is not a single person fighting, but depends on and creates ecology. When the ecology changes dramatically, species variation will occur, and species that cannot adapt to the new ecology will decline or even die out.

The development of the media industry is also an ecological evolution. The meteorite of the Internet, especially the mobile Internet, hit the traditional media industry, and the ecological change was as fierce as that asteroid hit the earth.

Because, we have encountered an era when technology "kidnapped" civilization.

The paper media is experiencing a "thousand-year-old change".

In history, the publishing and media industry in China has experienced two technological revolutions: the first revolution was from bamboo slips to printing. During the Qing Dynasty of the Northern Song Dynasty (1041-1048), Bi Sheng, a native of Hubei Province, invented movable type printing in Zhejiang. In the era of bamboo slips, it is impossible for cultural products to be copied in large quantities. Even with block printing, it is very difficult to copy a lot of information, especially fragile news information in batches. Movable type printing enables information to be copied in large quantities, which makes culture popular and information spread rapidly.

A direct effect is that a newspaper with modern communication significance appeared in the Song Dynasty-the "Di Bao" which was printed and distributed instead of a manuscript.

The second great change is today, thousands of years later, and the digital revolution has put printing (books, newspapers and periodicals) in an embarrassing situation. Interestingly, the two major changes happened just a thousand years ago, which is exactly what the sentence said: a change that has never happened in a thousand years.

Digitalization has changed human life and also changed human reading habits. Paper is no longer the main media form in the future, and various screens are evolving into the main media communication form.

No era has seen the survival and development of culture as it is today, and the influence of technology is so great that technology has played a decisive role in the development of culture and civilization. For example, the mobile Internet has completely changed the way culture spreads, which is an era when technology "kidnaps" civilization.

Third, the acceleration of information media iteration

The Internet impacts the paper media first, because the limitation of newspapers is inherent.

Newspapers, called Newspapers in English, are "newsprint". As the name implies, they are papers that publish and disseminate news. The most important thing in news is timeliness. The timeliness of newspapers is 24 hours, that of weekly magazines is 7 days, and that of monthly magazines is one month.

In the era of information shortage, human beings get news information mainly by reading newspapers, because newspapers have a large news load, and radio and television are limited by time periods, and the news load is small. Under normal circumstances, TV news can’t do as well as newspapers. Due to the limitation of TV broadcast time and duration, news events are difficult to explain clearly, but the timeliness of TV is dominant-it can be broadcast on the same day or even live. For many years, newspapers and radio and television have a strong and weak complementary relationship in news information, which has lasted for decades.

The emergence and popularization of the Internet broke this balance in one fell swoop.

First, the timeliness of information dissemination on the Internet is in seconds, which can be released at any time, modified at any time, followed up at any time and updated at any time. This is a war that cannot be won for a newspaper with a 24-hour cycle.

Second, compared with TV, the network has capacity advantages in addition to timeliness advantages. Cyberspace is infinite in theory, and the time for TV to broadcast news is limited.

Third, from a geographical point of view, network communication has no geographical restrictions and can quickly spread news throughout the country or even around the world. In the first decade of the 21st century, there appeared a situation in which newspapers asked the Internet to forward their manuscripts, even taking the number of manuscripts forwarded by the Internet as the evaluation standard. It was called the era of "newspapers vying for favor with the Internet", which was really a "happy suicide phenomenon".

Fourth, the instant interactive participation of online news is a powerful means that newspapers and radio and television can’t match. The satisfaction of network arouses the sense of participation and expression of human beings. It is inevitable that the newspaper’s boss attitude of "whether it is up to me or not" will be abandoned under the form of network equality.

From the perspective of prescription, compared with the Internet, newspapers are basically "old news". Gong Shuguang, the founder of xiaoxiang morning herald, put forward the "old news theory" of newspapers shortly after the newspaper was founded. He believes that compared with the internet, the information made by newspapers is not news, but old news. Because when the newspaper came out, the news was out of date, and even because of the qualitative change of news events, the newspaper report became "fake news" Because it has been a long time since the newspaper reached the readers through interview, editing, peer review, edition assembly, signature, publication, printing and delivery, the news may have undergone fundamental changes. This form of old news has become a major defect of newspapers in the network age, and it is also a major defect that newspapers themselves cannot solve.

The decline in newspaper advertisements since 2012 and the cliff-like decline since 2013 are not accidental, let alone coincidental. Because 2012 is a year of rapid development of mobile Internet, the main channel of online news dissemination has migrated from computer PC to mobile phone. Two landmark events are: in January 2011, Tencent launched WeChat; In August 2012, today’s headlines went online, and the social war and information war on the mobile side had a new overlord.

A cruel fact is that it is not that newspapers are not good-looking, but that you don’t need to read newspapers to read the news. Mobile phone information dissemination speed, forms of expression (text, video, animation), instant update, editing and reading interaction, whether from news timeliness, reading pleasure or interactive participation, the Internet has completely surpassed the paper media, and the mission of paper media as news information dissemination has come to an end.

Fourth, the inherent fatal weakness of urban newspapers

The great changes in the mode of communication almost killed the paper media, and the first one to decline was the urban newspaper, because the urban newspaper had an inherent fatal weakness, which was the defect of its business model. The prosperity of the day after tomorrow temporarily covered up this defect, and the Internet led to the differentiation between the information reading market and the advertising market, making this defect irreparable. This is what Mr. Xi Wenju, the "father of China Metropolis Daily", did not think of when he founded the mode of Metropolis Daily.

On January 1st, 1995, Xi Wenju, a newspaper legend affectionately called "Father Xi", founded Huaxi Dushi Bao, the first metropolis newspaper in China. Xi Wenju summed up a set of theories and methods for establishing a new type of city newspaper, comprehensively and systematically established the operating concept of newspaper marketization and a brand-new competitive strategy, which made Huaxi Dushi Bao rise rapidly and opened the "Metropolis Times" of China newspaper industry. Xi Wenju was known as the "Father of China Metropolis Daily".

The inherent defects of the business model of metropolis daily founded by "Xi Laoye" are: issuing at a reverse price and selling twice.

According to the general commodity law, the cost of a commodity is one yuan, and it must be sold for at least one yuan. This is called shun price, and the sales price is higher than the cost price. This is common sense.

But urban newspapers are not. Urban newspapers are sold at a very low price. How low is it? The printing cost of newspapers in 1 yuan or even those in 5 yuan costs 50 cents, which is still the retail price and the wholesale price is 20 cents. If you sell a copy at the lowest cost of 1 yuan money, you will lose 80 cents. If you issue 500,000 copies and have more pages, you will lose 400,000 a day in printing fees. This is only the printing cost, not including labor costs and office expenses. Printing costs will lose 100 million to 200 million a year.

The business logic of the reverse-price issuance of metropolis daily is: to exchange readers’ reading at a low price, and then to concentrate readers’ reading for the second sale, which is "secondary sale". The first sale is a loss. If the second sale can make up for the money lost in the first sale, this business logic can be played. If the second sale can’t make up for the loss of the first sale, the problem will come immediately.

The prosperous newspaper advertising market covers up the inherent achilles heel of metropolis daily, that is, the problem of profit model. Reverse price issue is a huge worry and has become a double-edged sword. As a new newspaper, in order to seize the reading market, the low price and "knocking on the door" invented by Xi Wenju made the metropolis newspaper seize the reading market quickly, and low price became a magic weapon. Nanjing, Jiangsu Province is a place where newspaper competition is relatively concentrated. Modern Express, Yangzi Evening News, Nanjing Morning News and Jinling Evening News are all doing well, and the price war is the bloodiest, and even newspapers with a retail price of 10 cents appear. In Changsha, Hunan Province, there was also a big discount for similar financial products that were returned three times in the first year of publication and in the third year. It is said that someone ordered 5,000 copies and made a big windfall.

Murphy’s Law, known as one of the three major discoveries of western culture in the 21st century, points out that the more you worry about, the more likely it is to happen. By 2013, what Metropolis Daily was most worried about happened. The first sale was still at a loss, but the second sale was in a cliff-like decline. Many newspapers fell by half, so newspapers fell into a vicious circle of "issuing at a reverse price and selling twice".

On the other hand, the "golden decade" of Metropolis Daily is a decade of great development of China’s real estate and automobiles. With the state’s regulation of real estate, overheated real estate began to cool down, and automobiles began to saturate. Newspaper advertisements declined for the first time since 2011. Although the amount of advertisements in metropolis daily is large, its structure is unreasonable, mainly relying on real estate and cars, which has also become one of the reasons for the structural collapse of advertisements.

Fifth, the misunderstanding of the Internet run by paper media

Of course, the paper media practitioners have seen the advantages of network communication. The paper media represented by the newspaper industry began to "integrate newspapers and networks" very early. There is no newspaper that has not run a news website, and there is no newspaper that does not shout "transformation to the Internet".

Around 2008, the tide of newspaper transformation came to the fore. The biggest transformation is Metropolitan Express, a subsidiary of Hangzhou Daily. The 19th Floor, an online community they founded, established Hangzhou Nineteenth Floor Network Co., Ltd. as early as 2006, which became an important part of the new media strategy of Hangzhou Daily Newspaper Group and Metropolitan Express. The company takes "where there is a city, there is an active 19th floor" as its entrepreneurial vision, and its main business has developed rapidly since its establishment. In addition to Hangzhou, the 19th Floor has successfully copied the 19th Floor in nearly 30 cities, including Taizhou, Jiaxing, Ningbo, Suzhou, Chongqing, Fuzhou, Jinhua and Shaoxing, through strategic cooperation, mergers and acquisitions, and created an urban network community with local attributes.

More newspapers use the means of running newspapers to make websites. The method is very simple, that is, running a news website and then moving the news content of newspapers online. There are many and miscellaneous contents, and there is no effective promotion means. Most of them have become things that newspapers talk to themselves and entertain themselves. The report is huge and the actual influence is greatly reduced.

After the rise of the mobile Internet, some newspapers have developed APP news clients at a very fast speed. Because there is no promotion method and the content and form do not meet the requirements of Internet communication, many newspapers have become "online versions", and most of them have become "dead souls" who are very lively and seemingly beautiful.

In the transition to new media, newspapers all over the country spend a lot of money, but few can really form influence and authority.

Sixth, the era of mass communication has changed rapidly

While the internet subverts the means of communication, the crowd, that is, the "audience" mentioned by the media, has also quietly changed, from the public to the focus, from the group to the circle.

The vigorous development of urban newspapers enriches information; With the rapid development of Internet, information has quickly entered the era of surplus from the era of shortage.

The huge amount of information on the Internet not only makes information enter the era of surplus from the era of shortage, but also quickly makes information transition from the era of mass to the era of focus. People are divided into different circles because of their different preferences. People are divided into different circles because of personal values, hobbies, personal experiences and other reasons. The crowd is rapidly subdivided, and the media enters the era of focus. Correspondingly, the mass economy also quickly enters the era of social economy.

Popular newspapers and periodicals are declining rapidly, and their readers are divided in an all-round way. Because of their inaccurate positioning, popular newspapers and periodicals can’t find their own people in the era of focus, and they don’t know who to read them to, which leads to the obvious decline of two kinds of media. One kind is urban newspapers. After golden decade, which is relatively short of information, when it enters the era of information surplus, it soon can’t find its own readers and becomes a big and unreasonable category. The other kind is abstract newspapers and periodicals, which are mostly geared to the public. Because of the diversification of communication means and the fragmentation of human reading time (mobile media era), people don’t need to choose for themselves, so they can read selectively on their mobile phones. This is the root cause of the decline of abstract newspapers.

Seven, the two directions of paper media transformation

Faced with the impact of the Internet tide, the paper media have sought to break through the transformation, forming two transformation directions: First, transforming themselves into a news production and communication organization, sticking to the news and no longer sticking to the paper media, and the transformation of Oriental Morning Post into "The Paper" is a successful case; The second is the transformation from operating media to operating users. Happy Old Man is a successful case.

At the end of 2016, the biggest news in the newspaper industry was that the last issue of Oriental Morning Post was fixed on December 31, and the mission of Oriental Morning Post ended, and the era of "The Paper" surged.

Oriental Morning Post was founded in 2003. Since 2013, it has been planning to transform into new media. From the beginning, it was a comprehensive transformation and a thorough transformation. Until 2017, when the paper newspaper was abandoned and the internet media was completely transformed, The Paper inherited and adhered to the original, in-depth and ideological reports at the core of Oriental Morning Post. Compared with the general internet media, it inherited the original and in-depth reports of the paper media and the rigorous style of manuscript expression, such as in-depth investigation, large-scale planning and revealing reports, making it a news production and dissemination organization with unique temperament. On the other hand, The Paper focuses on improving the originality of content, comprehensively improving the technical level, and combining technology and content to form new media products: AR, VR, full-motion video, H5 and other products that integrate various elements of news. The Paper is leading in China.

All-round transformation, inheriting the tradition of paper media news production, forming characteristic news products, and fully integrating into technology, has made The Paper a successful case of paper media transforming into Internet media.

In the ten years when the global paper media went down, there were also those that went up against the trend, one of which was Happy Old Man. Happy Old Man was founded in 2009 when the paper media in Europe and America declined, and in 2013 when the paper media in China declined, its circulation exceeded one million.

Happy Old Man puts forward a grand mission: "To provide solutions for the aging society in China". Put forward the road map of "from spiritual enclosure to industrial integration", and a newspaper will comprehensively enter the elderly industry.

After ten years’ hard work, Happy Old Man has become an old-age industrial phalanx with newspapers, magazines, websites, WeChat matrix, publishing, travel agencies, e-commerce companies and universities for the elderly, and has become an example of paper media’s industrial transformation in the Internet age.

The concept of the transformation of Happy Old People is: from operating media to operating people.

The transformation dilemma of most newspapers lies in that readers are not clearly positioned and don’t know who is reading the newspaper. Happy Old People has conducted in-depth research on the crowd and found a new trend of the elderly population in China: the "new old people" group has been formed.

Happy Old Man first put forward the concept of "new old man": the baby boomers after the founding of New China are growing into "new old people" completely different from the traditional old people. "New old people" refers to the largest baby boomer generation born in China from 1950 to 1970, which was the most typical in the 1960s. They have enjoyed the fruits of reform and opening up, with high income, large savings and good consumption concept. They have become a new consumer, and the cultural needs of the "new elderly" are just needed. Under the general trend of shrinking demand of the traditional elderly circle, the "new elderly" group has quietly grown into an obvious "small trend". Nowadays, the old-age industry is in the ascendant. Under the pain point of social old-age care, "cultural old-age care" has become a trend with great energy.

Under the general trend of the decline of paper media, there are two "small trends" of the media: the diversification of content and the accuracy of communication. For China, a populous country, "small is big", and any division will form a "public".

"Happy Old Man" does not do news as "old news" or focus on the public, but firmly grasps the focus that has a strong dependence on paper media-the elderly group, making "Happy Old Man" a newspaper that the elderly like, serving the people behind the newspaper, and taking the lead in stepping out of the "old road" of taking the media as a single product. This also found a way out for paper media: from operating media to operating people.

Along with this demand, apart from running newspapers, Happy Old People’s Newspaper also launched a series of cultural products: Fengwang WeChat Matrix specially serving "new old people", Kangyi Lived Over 100 years old magazine specially showing the elegance of elderly students, Happy Life Publishing House specially publishing books for the elderly, Mimetime International Travel Agency specially serving the elderly, Jiangsu Happy Old People’s E-commerce Company specially customizing products for the elderly, and launched the offline campus of Happy Old People’s University in 2017.

The transformation from operating media to operating people has made Happy Old People newspaper a single media product, and then become a service field for people, which has opened an infinitely broad space for media development.

The author believes that the above two successful cases represent the direction of the transformation and development of paper media in the era of integration. (The author is the president of Hunan Newspaper Association, the chairman of Hunan Happy Old People Industry Management Co., Ltd. and the president of Happy Old People Newspaper.)

Original title: "On two directions of newspaper transformation and breakthrough"

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