About Beijing Morning Post

Beijing Morning Post

Beijing Morning Post (Chinese: 北京晨报; pinyin: Beijing Chenbao) was a Chinese-language metropolitan daily newspaper published in Beijing. It was jointly founded by the Beijing Daily, the Beijing Evening News and the Beijing Youth Daily on 20 July 1998, and it later belonged to the Beijing Daily Newspaper Group. It was the first metropolitan morning paper in the capital in the era of the People's Republic, a broadsheet covering city news, finance, culture, sport and services for Beijing readers. Facing competition from livelier rivals and the shift of readers and advertising online, it published its final print issue on 31 December 2018 under a municipal media-integration plan.

Founding in 1998

The paper was created at the height of China's metropolitan newspaper boom, when the established party papers of the big cities were launching commercial offspring aimed at ordinary urban readers rather than at work units and officials. Three of Beijing's established titles — the municipal party organ Beijing Daily, the long-running Beijing Evening News and the Beijing Youth Daily — combined to found the new morning paper, which appeared on 20 July 1998. In its own farewell account, the paper recalled that it had been founded as the first urban morning newspaper and the first colour daily newspaper in the capital, and that Beijingers had affectionately called it their "information breakfast". The morning slot was its identity: where the capital's readers had traditionally waited for an evening paper, the Beijing Morning Post was designed to be read with the start of the working day, carrying the previous day and night's news in a form timed for commuters and breakfast tables.

Place in the Beijing Daily Newspaper Group

In 2000 the Beijing Daily Newspaper Group was formed, bringing the capital's municipal titles under one roof, and the Beijing Morning Post became one of the group's newspapers. Within that stable it occupied a distinct position. The Beijing Daily remained the official organ of the municipal committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and the Beijing Evening News held the evening market it had served since the 1950s. The Morning Post was the group's morning metropolitan title, expected to compete on newsstand appeal and advertising rather than on official authority. That division of labour was typical of Chinese press groups of the period, in which a party organ's commercial "child papers" earned the revenue that sustained the group as a whole.

Format and sections

The paper was a daily broadsheet, typically printed in colour. Its pages were organised into named groups of sections covering the full metropolitan range: city news, finance, focus and in-depth reporting, key national news, entertainment, sport, international news, domestic news and consumer and life services, together with a supplement known as "Morning Tea" (早茶). That breadth was the standard architecture of the Chinese metropolitan daily, which had to serve simultaneously as a reader's window on national affairs and as a practical guide to life in its home city — housing, prices, transport, health and education — in a single purchase.

Beijing, the market it served

Beijing was an unusually crowded newspaper market. As China's capital it supported the national papers published from the city as well as a full set of municipal titles, and from 2003 it also had The Beijing News, founded by the Guangming Daily group and the Nanfang media group and widely regarded as one of the country's most professional metropolitan papers. The Beijing Morning Post competed in this field for the morning reader against both its own stablemates' brands and aggressive rivals, at a time when Beijing's rapid growth — new suburbs, a vast commuter population and the build-up to the 2008 Olympic Games — was continually reshaping the audience for city news.

The metropolitan boom and its end

The paper's twenty years spanned almost exactly the rise and fall of the Chinese commercial metropolitan press. Such papers, launched across China from the mid-1990s as profitable spin-offs of party newspapers, flourished while print advertising boomed. The China Media Project, surveying the closures, notes that by the 2010s that market was cratering under the impact of digital platforms such as Tencent's WeChat, and that a wave of suspensions followed: sixteen newspapers discontinued publication in China in 2017 and another forty-five in 2018, according to figures cited in the Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research. In 2018 there were, in the China Media Project's phrase, countless closures, including Beijing titles, and the Beijing Morning Post was among the papers that disappeared in that period. Commercial papers were hit hardest because they depended on the advertising and newsstand sales that migrated online, while their party-paper parents, supported by government funds, continued.

The 2018 integration decision

The end was administrative as much as commercial. In 2018 it was announced that The Beijing News, the Beijing Morning Post and the Qianlong website would be brought together in a merger, part of Beijing's plan to consolidate its municipal media and concentrate resources on fewer, digitally oriented outlets. Already in August 2018, Beijing postal subscription information indicated that the Morning Post's print edition would stop at the end of the year. The paper thus closed not in isolation but as one element in a deliberate restructuring of the capital's press portfolio by its municipal owners.

The final issue

The last edition appeared on 31 December 2018. Its front page carried a final "good morning" to readers, announcing that the paper would be suspended from the following day, and its label was fixed forever at issue number 7,461 — the total of its days of publication. The sixteen-page final edition carried a long farewell article, "Before 1998 … After 2018", which recalled the paper's founding moment in a previous round of media change, its twenty years of reporting on the major events of the country from a Beijing base, and its intention to embrace the new round of change rather than be overtaken by it. "In the past twenty years, based in Beijing and looking at the whole country, Beijing Morning Post has never been absent" from major events, the farewell claimed, signing off with the promise that paper and readers, parting in winter, remained friends who could still greet one another.

What the paper represented

For press historians the Beijing Morning Post is a tidy emblem of its era. It was born in 1998, the moment when China's party press groups were learning to run market-facing city papers, and it was among the first of its kind in the capital — the city's first metropolitan morning paper of the People's Republic era and its first colour daily. It died twenty years later in the same city, in a consolidation that treated print titles as assets to be merged into converged media operations. Its lifespan, from issue one to issue 7,461, maps closely onto the two decades in which the metropolitan daily was the dominant form of urban journalism in China.

Legacy

The title did not survive the integration in print, and the Beijing Daily Newspaper Group continued with its remaining papers and its digital operations. The Morning Post's farewell framing — that it was transforming rather than simply ending — was the standard language of Chinese newspaper closures of the period, but the record it left is concrete: twenty years of daily publication, a defined place in the capital's morning market, and a documented role as one of the three founding ventures through which Beijing's established party papers entered the metropolitan age. Its closure, alongside those of the Beijing Times and other capital titles in the same years, marked the effective end of competitive morning-paper publishing in Beijing.