About Yunnan Daily

Yunnan Daily

Yunnan Daily, in Chinese Yunnan Ribao, is the official provincial newspaper of Yunnan in southwest China. It is published in Chinese in Kunming, the provincial capital, by the Yunnan Daily Press Group — also rendered Yunnan Daily Newspaper Group — and its electronic-paper edition is hosted at yndaily.yunnan.cn. Reference lists of Chinese newspapers, drawing on the Yunnan provincial newspaper annals, date its first issue to 1950, the year the People's Liberation Army entered Kunming and Yunnan came under the government of the new People's Republic of China. As the Yunnan provincial party newspaper, Yunnan Daily is the senior title of a group whose other newspapers include Chuncheng Evening News and Yunnan Economic Daily, and whose documented development since 2009 — a diversified press group, a province-wide converged-media "central kitchen," and an external-communication operation aimed at South and Southeast Asia — has been described in detail by the group's own deputy editor-in-chief.

Founding and provincial role

The Yunnan table in the standard list of newspapers in China records Yunnan Daily as first issued in 1950, published in Kunming by the Yunnan Daily Group, in Chinese, with its e-paper site at yndaily.yunnan.cn; the dating is sourced to the provincial newspaper annals. The paper was thus founded at the very start of the People's Republic's administration of Yunnan: party-history accounts record that the PLA formally entered Kunming on 20 February 1950. As the provincial party daily, Yunnan Daily became the newspaper of record for Yunnan, a status visible in foreign monitoring of the Chinese press: United States government translation reports of the 1980s, for example, cite "Kunming Yunnan Ribao in Chinese" by date and page number as a source for State Council regulations and provincial news, the treatment reserved for an authoritative provincial organ.

Publisher: Yunnan Daily Press Group

Yunnan Daily is published by the Yunnan Daily Press Group. In an interview published by China Media Technology and archived on ChinaXiv, Tian Jing, deputy editor-in-chief of the group and director of its All-Media Command Center, stated that since its establishment in December 2009 the group has followed a model of "separation of business and enterprise, and separation of news gathering and business operations." Under that model the group stabilised its newspaper business while diversifying into related industries, forming five major sectors: "Yunnan Daily Media," covering traditional advertising, distribution and printing as well as internet and new media operations; "Yunnan Daily Culture," involved in real estate and automobile exhibitions and in promoting the party newspaper's "Urban and Rural Electronic Newspaper Reading Kiosks" project; "Yunnan Daily Real Estate," which developed projects including "Newspaper Metropolis" and "Anning Journalist Village"; "Yunnan Daily Finance"; and "Yunnan Daily Tourism."

Sister newspapers in the group

The group's best-known sister title is Chuncheng Evening News — Chuncheng is "Spring City," Kunming's nickname — a Chinese-language Kunming evening newspaper first issued in 1980 and published by the Yunnan Daily Group, with its site at ccwb.yunnan.cn. The group also publishes Yunnan Economic Daily, first issued in 1984, whose e-paper is hosted at jjrbpaper.yunnan.cn. The three Kunming titles — the provincial party daily of 1950, the metropolitan evening paper of 1980 and the economic daily of 1984 — give the group a layered presence in its home market, with Yunnan Daily carrying the official provincial role and the evening paper serving the urban and community readership that the group later built one of its converged-media product clusters around.

Printing investment

The group's printing operation was expanded in 2009, when the Yunnan Daily Newspaper Group added a further manroland Uniset press to the Uniset lines already installed in its pressroom. The supplier reported that the new press could be used as an independent unit or integrated into the existing Uniset lines, and that it was intended to guarantee high printing quality and enhance printing capability, taking the overall productivity and capacity of the printing centre to a new level. The signing ceremony was attended by manroland Greater China's senior management and by group representatives including general manager Wang Jianyou, deputy general manager Liu Weiping and Yin Tengyun, president of Yunnan Fortune Seecome Investment-Industrial. The investment is a documented example of the scale of the group's newspaper production in Kunming at the end of the 2000s.

Media convergence and the central kitchen

From 2014, under the leadership of the Yunnan Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government, the group pursued media convergence — the integration of its newspapers with its digital outlets. Its converged-media platform, the "central kitchen," is a key project supported by the Yunnan Provincial Party Committee's Propaganda Department for the province's media convergence development, serving as the core platform for content production, channel distribution and resource sharing across the provincial party newspaper system. In September 2015 the group established a central kitchen construction leadership group and working team. Through the all-media command center, all-media editing platform and big data platform, the central kitchen achieved multichannel, multiformat information collection; for distribution, the group built a mobile communication matrix linking Weibo, WeChat, news clients and websites under a mobile-first strategy, with a release sequence of "first client, then website, then newspaper" — a reversal of the print-first order in which Yunnan Daily had operated since 1950.

In 2017 the group listed deepening media convergence as the top priority in all its work, planning to use the Yunnan Daily Media Plaza then under construction as a core platform for transformation, bringing together the central kitchen, a new media center, a multilingual news release hall, a new media research institute and maker spaces.

Cooperation with prefecture-level party newspapers

The central kitchen was built not only for the group's own titles. On 8 December 2016 Yunnan Daily Press Group signed the Yunnan Provincial Party Newspaper Converged Media Platform Cooperation Framework Agreement with the party newspapers of the province's 16 prefecture-level cities, to share converged-media platform resources. Under the agreement the group opens exclusive accounts for prefecture-level cooperative media to access the central kitchen, and it is responsible for organising its subsidiaries — including Yunnan Daily, Yunnan Net, the Yunnan Daily client and Spring City Evening News — in support of the shared platform. The arrangement made the provincial party daily's Kunming newsroom infrastructure the production hub for party newspapers across Yunnan.

Product clusters and external communication

Tian Jing's account describes the group's output reorganised into product clusters. Among those documented are an external publicity cluster for Southeast and South Asia centred on the group's "Four Journals" for external publicity, Yunqiao Net and the Yun Express English website; an urban and community cluster centred on Spring City Evening News, Spring City One Net and the Spring City Evening News client, providing community information and smart community services; a theoretical research and commentary cluster centred on Yunnan Daily's theory and commentary section, Yunnan Theory Net and Caiyun Commentary; and an innovative service cluster represented by "Huifu Sihai" and "927 Travel Net," covering internet finance, e-commerce and tourism services.

The external-communication role is exercised through the group's International Communication Center, which sponsored a study tour for reporters from ASEAN countries, Pakistan, Russia and China who visited Kunming, Yuxi and Huaning County, a programme aimed at promoting biodiversity, culture and technological advancement in Yunnan and cooperation with the regional bloc, in a province that borders Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.

Digital presence

Yunnan Daily's own digital presence runs through the group's yunnan.cn domain family: its e-paper at yndaily.yunnan.cn, alongside the Spring City Evening News site at ccwb.yunnan.cn and the Yunnan Economic Daily e-paper at jjrbpaper.yunnan.cn, as well as Yunnan Net and the Yunnan Daily news client, which under the group's mobile-first sequence now publishes before the printed newspaper. The provincial party daily founded in 1950 thus reaches its readers today first on a phone app operated from the same Kunming group headquarters, with the print edition — still produced on the group's own presses — following in the release order its own convergence programme established.