Twelve years on from the Internet's arrival in China, the various forms of Internet media have become an 800-pound gorilla that are challenging, if not cornering, the print industry.

No one is predicting that Internet media websites that inform, entertain and sell as well as host discussion groups and blogs will turn books, magazines and newspapers into dinosaurs. But with the print medium's audience and advertising revenue being dented, many of its operators and overseers envisage an enhanced partnership as the only way to remain profitable.

The Forum on the Internet Media of China hosted by the China Daily website and the Yunnan provincial government will see media executives and experts convening tomorrow in Kunming to discuss how the print and Internet media can co-exist to benefit mutually, among other issues, organizers said on Monday.

"Within just a few years, Internet media have stood up to newspapers and broadcasting as an equal," Min Dahong, a participant, told China Daily. "With their exponential growth and ever-expanding capacity, you can well imagine the pressure they exert on traditional media."

Min, a former senior researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank, has followed Web expansion since the country was wired in April 1994. He is now the vice-president of the Beijing Internet Media Society, which conducts research on the medium.

Illustrating how these digital gorillas flex their muscles, Min said that Sina.com, the largest Chinese Web portal, attracted a huge audience last year during the launch of Shenzhou VI, China's second manned spacecraft.

Print medium seeks Internet 'marriage'

It registered a record 450 million page views on October 12 alone, the day of the launch.

China now stands second to the United States in the number of Internet users 123 million at the end of this June, up from 111 million six months before according to a biannual survey released by the China Internet Network Information Centre in July.

Slightly more than half of the Chinese surfers are 35 years old and younger, and 66.3 per cent of them listed news as their most-used service, the survey said.

The "2006 Blue Book of China's Media," published by Tsinghua University and the Social Science Documentation Publishing House, cited Internet media as one reason newspaper ad sales grew by 7 per cent in the first half of 2005, compared with an average growth of 20 per cent in the previous decade.

Chinese online ad sales totalled 3.13 billion yuan (US$396 million) last year, and are expected to jump to 4.6 billion yuan (US$555 million) 48 per cent this year, according to a forecast by the iResearch Consulting Group, an Internet medium research firm in Shanghai.

Braving the storm

Odds are that the print medium will continue to lose popularity, but it is unlikely to be eliminated in the foreseeable future as newspapers still have many advantages like convenience and choice content at low cost, said Yu Guoming, a journalism professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing.

"Traditional media are increasingly under pressure from the Internet, but the former still maintains credible brands, take up major market shares and exert mainstream influence in the industry," Yu told China Daily in an interview.

"New technology is not the realm of only the Internet. The newspaper industry can also jump on the digital bandwagon to display its advantages and, in the meantime, react and adapt to changes in readers' habits."

He also cited core values, such as the credibility and integrity associated with brands and a more professional way of gathering and producing the news, compared with the Internet medium.

These values will not be compromised just because newspapers are presented in forms other than print, he said.

"Traditional media today should enhance their crisis management sense and seize the opportunity to transform themselves," Yu told a summit on media brands last month in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning Province in the Northeast.

Echoing Yu, Min Dahong said traditional media will need to deliver their content through multiple platforms, including the Internet, compact discs, broadcasting and communications networks aside from paper.

Shi Feng, deputy chief of the General Administration of Press and Publication, said content, not technology, would ultimately win users.

"In response to the emerging media, the print industry should proactively integrate with them and use new technology and new mechanisms to expand its foothold," he said.

The convergence of print and new media could ultimately produce a digital newspaper business, Shi said.

"Newspapers could be digitized in many forms ... and we need more practice in this field, but our purpose is to develop the industry to deliver information in a faster, wider and better fashion," he said.

In its development guideline for the media industry during the country's 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-10), Shi's agency set forth a "digital newspaper industry" strategy, encouraging the print medium to develop e-newspapers and other digital products and provide information services at an additional cost.

Saving trees

Some news organizations are already piloting paperless newspapers. For example, Jiefang Daily, which circulates mainly in Shanghai, published its first e-newspaper on April 14.

In addition, the iResearch Consulting Group said in September that digital magazines in China reached a total circulation of 360 million last year and predicted it would increase by 75 per cent to reach 610 million in 2006.

Tian Yong, president of www.cnnb.com.cn (China Ningbo Network), said that by going digital, e-newspapers could attract more young readers, most of whom are glued to the Internet.

Newsrooms changing

William Dean Singleton, chief executive of MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper companies in the United States, said the print industry was not declining but changing.

"We have to be much more judicious in how we gather news," he told Forbes magazine in a recent interview.

"Most newsrooms have fewer people than they did five years ago, and they'll continue to have fewer."

Changes are taking place in China's newsrooms, too.

Zhang Yanping, head of Beijing Youth Daily, said that compared with the Internet, whose storage capacity for information is virtually infinite, newspapers compose a medium with limited space.

To brave the challenges, publishers will then have to choose the most valuable information to meet the needs of the readers.

Peng Lan, author of "The First Decade of Internet Media in China," said on Monday that TV and radio programmes in China have increasingly improved their timeliness in reporting under the pressure from Internet media.

Many print outlets have adopted forms such as "background links," which are popular in the Internet medium, she said.

More directly, traditional media are using the Internet to help identify what the public wants.

One example is a recent newspaper report on the "most beautiful women journalists." The website www.dahe.cn, run by Henan Newspaper Group in Central China, first covered the story of Cao Aiwen, a reporter with the Henan Television Station, who stopped an interview on July 10 to help save the life of a 13-year-old girl who had fallen into a river.

The story was picked up later by local and national newspapers. Some netizens proposed awarding Cao the title of "most beautiful woman journalist" an idea published in mainstream newspapers.

"This case has great significance in the study of mass communications," said Dong Lin, a www.dahe.cn executive.

Ye Shuimao, deputy chief of Zhong'an Online (China Anhui Online), the biggest portal in East China's Anhui Province, said more and more "marriages" between newspapers and commercial dotcoms has been taking place in China in recent years.

Zhong'an Online is an integration of China Anhui web with the Anhui Daily Press Group, and similar "win-win" partnerships have been forged in Central China's Hunan Province and South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Ye said.

Except those run by newspapers, commercial websites in China are not entitled to conduct interviews as news organizations do, according to relevant State regulations.

That may have explained why Chen Tong, editor-in-chief of Sina.com, said he believed there was more co-operation than competition between Internet and traditional media.

If he's right, that means the 800-pound gorilla and traditional media will cross-breed and grow into an even larger hybrid.