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December 28 Another Good Newspaper Gone to the DogsJust got news from a friend that The Beijing News, a daring Beijing daily paper and a joint venture between the famous Southern Metropolis Daily and official Guangming Daily, is going down. This is pretty much the only newspaper still worth reading in the damn capital city, and now heaven knows what is going to become of it next year.
An editorial staff meeting is going on at this very moment, in which they have just announced that chief editor Yang Bin and several other senior editors are being replaced, probably by stupid idiots from the Guangming Daily. Usually this would mean the quality of the paper nosediving, daring exclusive coverage disappearing, good journalists leaving like fleeing a plague -- which is already happening -- just as happened to the Southern Weekend a long time ago. That paper is now a shell and shame of its former self...
P.S. A post on the Reporters' Home BBS just confirmed this. Apart from chief editor Yang Bin, according to the post, two other deputy chief editors were also removed. And yes indeed the studpid bastards from Guangming Daily will take over major management and editorial posts at the paper. There has long been talk that, seeing The Beijing News's profitabilty grow in recent months, the bigwigs at Guangming were getting greedy and up to something like this. Now they did it. This, of course, also has a lot to do with the censorship authorities' displeasure with the paper for some recent coverage -- with that on the Dingzhou, Hebei violence against villagers in particular.
P.P.S. Not surprisingly, the post on Reporters' Home BBS was deleted after a few hours. But this definitely has become the hottest (saddest too?) journalisitic gossip in town, and people are continuing to post comments there. The great, infallible journalist blogger 十年砍柴 ("chopping wood for ten years") has a very insightful piece on this (in Chinese). He too thinks the main factor for the reshuffle is that the big guns at Guangming are drooling about the ad money The Beijing News is raking in these days, that they used censorship pressure as a pretence to take over the lucrative paper. Comments (8)
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