Keeping you informed for more than 20 years
Print Edition
ON July 1, Jiading News celebrated 20 years since it resumed publishing in 1996.
Just after New Year’s Day that year, Zhao Chunhua was made editor-in-chief with the task of resuming publishing the newspaper. The former government secretary and editor of a county broadcasting station took up the challenge.
Zhao did field studies in Baoshan and Jinshan districts to learn about publishing a district-level newspaper. He also looked up old versions of the Jiading News before its closure in 1958.
After a deputy editor-in-chief and two administrative staff were appointed, Zhao began to recruit talented journalists in the district.
There were many applicants but a written test involving classical Chinese translation as well as opinion and feature writing left just 10 people in competition. They were asked to write a news story involving Qinghe Road. Five employees were selected after that exercise and the newspaper went to print as a four-page publication.
But Zhao says he still feels guilty about a single mistake on its front page — a wrongly used Chinese character.
Zhao was also unhappy about the main headline — it was too small. The newspaper was also facing a funding shortage as the government would only subsidize it to the tune of a million yuan for the first three years. After that the newspaper had to pay its way.
All the news crew also shared the responsibility of attracting advertising in addition to their primary tasks.
Pan Yongfa succeeded Zhao in 2002 and attracting advertising was still a problem and beginning to affect news quality. Pan reported the situation to the Party’s Jiading Committee and the newspaper revoked its advertisement section and became fully funded by the government in 2004.
The same year, the newspaper became free for residents instead of subscription so circulation increased to 25,000 copies from fewer than 10,000.
The district’s Party chief praised the newspaper in 2005 during a Party learning campaign and grassroots Party organizations asked the committee to also provide them with the Jiading News. The circulation increased to 50,000 and then 80,000.
By 2007, its circulation had increased to more than 100,000.
After Pan retired, Zhu Jian, then deputy, became editor-in-chief and under her leadership, Jiading News launched a monthly edition on June 25 2007, a daily livelihood edition in early 2011 and an English edition on July 28, 2008. Plans to launch a city-wide English newspaper were set aside after negotiation with Shanghai Daily executives but the two parties finalized a one-year cooperation contract based on the quality of its reports, Zhu recalled.
The Jiading News English edition went on to win a Silver Pigeon Award, the top awards for cross-cultural communication in Shanghai conferred by Shanghai Municipal Government.
Huang Youbin replaced Zhu to lead the newspaper in 2012 and Jiading News set up website and mobile editions.
Jiading News opened its official WeChat account in 2015 and editorial procedures have been reorganized to fit these four channels of publishing. News would first go online and take on another perspective in the print edition, sometimes having an opinion piece with it.
Jiading News also set up an office automation system enabling editorial staff to submit reports, review reports, sort reports and distribute reports in the system.
In July 2015, the departments of the newspaper regrouped with every one of the crew becoming a reporter and after the trial, its original news pieces become hot topics online.
The newspaper published a piece of news on its official WeChat account relevant to historical epic TV series “Legend of Miyue” and citing that Miyue’s first love Huang Xie’s ferry site and estate is in Jiading according to historic records. The item piece became a hit on the Internet with total clicks of 80,000 since the TV series is popular all over China.
Huang Youbin said the news will never die and the changes of media only has a start but no end.
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