The last-ever issue of an influential Guangzhou-based sports newspaper, Nanfang Sports, rolled off the presses yesterday.
That day's Star Daily, an entertainment newspaper published in Beijing, reported that in future the five-year-old sports paper will be absorbed as a weekly supplement of Nanfang Metropolis Daily.
In a telephone interview with Star Daily on Monday, Gong Xiaoyue, the sports paper's editor-in-chief, admitted that his paper was defeated by competition from the internet and coverage in more comprehensive newspapers.
Nanfang Sports began on March 17, 2000 and has since become a quite influential sports paper.
"We didn't fully realize our problem until five months ago when we began to change the original biweekly paper to a weekly. But it was too late," said Gong.
"The emerging internet in China is more convenient for speedy and continuous information," he said. "As a paper specializing in sports, we should have made strategic changes much earlier, focusing on in-depth analyses instead of only providing 'real-time' reports."
"We have accumulated a wealth of experience and brought forth new ideas in sports coverage. However, I must admit that we failed in making a profit," he said.
There is a long list of sporting newspapers that have closed in recent years, including Qiubao, 21st Century Sports, Sports Express, Sports Times and Sports Herald.
21st Century Sports, a Sichuan-based weekly, only ran for half a year before it stopped on September 28, 2002. During that time, the newspaper office invested an average of over 800,000 yuan a month, but the paper remained unprofitable.
There are still many others feeling the pinch.
Sports Youth started publication on March 6, 2000, with Bi Xidong, a senior sports reporter and famous soccer critic, as editor-in-chief.
Beijing's only sports paper, it has focused on covering the games of Beijing Hyundai, a local team in the China Super League (CSL). As the team's results got steadily worse, the weekly also lost circulation, and last month Bi was transferred from the paper.
"They didn't sign working contracts with us," an employee of the paper complained on condition of anonymity. "We have no insurance, and often suffer from payments in arrears. Sometimes we even have to go out for interviews on our own expenses."
Yang Ming, a senior Xinhua sports reporter, attributed the deaths of Nanfang Sports and others to longstanding ferocious competition. "Along with the marketization of basketball and soccer, a large number of sporting newspapers have emerged. Over the years rivals have cut the ground from under each other's feet."
Yang said one way they had done this was to use inflated wages to poach talent from each other, and that they were now paying for it.
According to Jin Shan, director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Culture and Sports Research Center, in recent years fake reports and scandals have flooded sporting newspapers, turning readers off. Meanwhile, more and more dailies have three to four pages of sports news, which has been very attractive to ordinary readers.
Song Jianwu, director of the Media Management Institute at Renmin University of China, thought the current situation was inevitable, and that "as a few media companies take most market shares, others are bound to perish."
A more stable situation and straightforward competition is expected after the current reshuffle. "Choosing to withdraw at this moment, as Nanfang Sports did, may well have been the smartest thing to do," Song said.
However, on August 8 a new sporting paper, Yangtze Sports, began publication in Jiangsu Province.
Its editor-in-chief, Chen Jianjun, is ambitious: "We shall not be affected by the closure of Nanfang Sports. This October's 10th National Games in Jiangsu, next year's World Cup in Germany and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games will create perfect opportunities for us to develop."
(China.org.cn by Shao Da, August 31, 2005)
