Chinese Paper Boys Give Their American Counterparts a Run For Their Money

Today some of the students and myself were lucky enough to get the chance to visit Beijing Youth Daily, which is a newspaper aimed at…you guessed it…youth.  Although it is a youth based circulation, you might say their definition of youth clashes with that of the US.  The editors we met with today said their demographic is any Beijing Citizen ranging in age from 25-40, and while that is not old by any means, by American standards it would not be included in a “youth” category. 
Being from a broadcast background myself, I was a little out of my league when discussing graphics and placement, but to me news is news and therefore I loved getting the chance to meet with reporters and editors alike, and picking their brain a little bit about the business.  Either way, it was a very insightful tour, giving us all an inside look at what being a journalist in another country, especially one so politically different than our own, feels like. For example, all five of the major newspapers, all of which are circulated daily, are state owned…one can only imagine the amount of control our government and politicians might exercise in the US if such power over the press was granted.  State run or not, I still got the feeling that the employees were very passionate about journalism and their duty to the public.

On to a few tid-bits of information about the newspaper business here in Beijing… There are a total of 1,000 employees at the Beijing Youth Daily alone, 300 of them being journalists…the paper costs 1 yuan a day (which works out to be about 10 cents for us in America) with a circulation of 600,000.

And on a more interesting note…the male mannequins pictured below are not soccer players on a team the newspaper sponsors, but rather the paper boys who deliver the news every morning.  Our tour guide said all paper boys employed by the Beijing Youth Daily sport these uniforms while on the job.