Judging from Chinese media reports, the outlook on traditional media was generally dark at a recent mass media forum held at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. At the forum, Tsinghua jointly released a report called “Chinese Mass Media Development 2006” with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Here are some numbers and predictions from the forum and the report:
Tsinghua’s report on mass media, released April 12, said China’s newspaper industry faced critical drops in advertising income in 2005, following a decade of rapid development. Overall ad spending on newspapers was down 15 percent year-on-year in 2005, the report said. The report cited the rise of new media, including the Internet, as the chief cause of the downturn, and also noted that the newspaper sectors overseas, including the United States, Europe and Japan, had also logged decreases since 1995. Cui Baoguo, director of Tsinghua University’s Media Management Center, predicted newspapers would in the future be replaced by new media.
Not surprisingly, the report was more optimistic about the business prospects of the Internet in China. In particular, the report offered eye-raising figures on the development of blogs, with blog users expected to surpass 60 million in 2006 and reach 100 million in 2007.
China’s film industry also made a strong showing in Tsinghua’s report. Output growth in the industry was ahead of the country’s GDP growth in 2005, it said, but noted Chinese films were struggling to shake off their conservative image.
Other bright areas included digital multimedia broadcasting and 3G business.
[Posted by Brian Chan, April 24, 2006, 11:45am]