Newsstands: an irreversible decline?
- By Wei Jia
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E-mail China.org.cn, November 21, 2017
When was the last time you bought an actual newspaper or magazine? As the popularity of digital devices transforms the reading habits of Chinese people, the struggle of print media filters all the way from the shiny headquarters of once-dominant news organizations to non-descript newsstands tucked away on street corners.
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This photo taken in June 2016 shows a newsstand in Shenzhen in south China. Selling an array of beverages and ice-creams, it looks like a convenience store rather than a newsstand. [Photo credit: VCG] |
Earlier this month, just under 100 newsstand vendors in Shanghai wore a mask bearing the words "Silence for Today" to bid farewell to their newsstands slated to be dismantled by the city, and the newsstand's days of glory. Yang Yexin, an artist, was behind this idea.
"The rise of new media has changed the fate of traditional media, and ‘screen reading' is the new order of the day," said Yang. "What I intended to express with ‘Silence for Today' is the loss of their selves people feel in the Internet discourse marked by extreme noise and extreme self-isolation."
Yang's thoughts might be too abstract. Some concrete numbers paint a more compelling picture of the predicament newsstand vendors find themselves in. In their heydays, there were more than 3,000 newsstands in Shanghai. Currently, there are a little more than 200.
Shanghai is far from being alone in witnessing the decline of the newsstand. According to China Post Group Corporation, the major governing body of newsstands in China, more than 10,000 newsstands were shuttered nationwide between 2008 and 2012.
For those newsstands that do remain, their vendors have to break official rules to justify paying to operate an apparently outdated facility. Many vendors in Beijing take to selling beverages and even snacks, for example, even though they don't have a license to do so. The city's municipal government made it clear in 2016 that newsstands in the city, about 1,600 in total, cannot sell merchandise not listed in their licenses, which do not include food and drinks.
No wonder newsstands have lost their appeal to potential vendors who want to make a profit without worrying all the time that stern-faced city officials would appear to warn and sometimes fine them for selling bottled water.
Another reason commonly evoked for a local government's abhorrence against newsstands is that many of them encroach on street space, impeding pedestrians' free passage.
This problem is surely the easier of the two. Some not-too-complex rethink on urban planning should solve that without wiping all newsstands out. Another approach to making newsstands less of an obstruction to pedestrians is shrinking them. The latest rule on newsstands issued by the municipal government of Beijing caps the size of a newsstand in the city at 3.75 square meters, a significant trim from the previous standard of 6 square meters.
To revive print press and make people return to the old ways of picking up newspapers and magazines from a newsstand, in comparison, is an infinitely more daunting task. But newsstands could reinvent themselves by reducing their reliance on a struggling industry and exploring other possibilities in their functions.
The Hangzhou Municipal Postal Administration spent 20 million yuan, or about US$ 3 million, in 2011, upgrading the 386 newsstands in the city. Besides getting their newspapers and magazines, citizens in Hangzhou could also pay utilities, buy air tickets and long-haul coach tickets there.
Beijing is also eyeing news roles for newsstands. Local authorities are inviting the public to send in their designs in a competition that may decide what a newsstand looks like in the city in future. In the official notice about the competition, it is stressed that the new newsstand should be equipped with smart devices and provide services that bring convenience to residents.
Whatever the upgraded newsstand in Beijing may look like, it is too early to write newsstands off. Although being able to buy a newspaper from a newsstand on their own may never again be a milestone in a child's growth, people could find reasons other than reading the latest news for traipsing to a multi-functional box close to where they live that sells newspapers on the side.
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