Online Business Intelligence | CHINESE
CANADIAN NEWSPAPER WAR
Paper
Tigers For the past decade, three Chinese-language newspapers
have battled it out for market dominance. In the mid-1990s, Ming Pao
captured top spot over Sing Tao and World Journal by positioning itself as
required reading for the wealthy, educated newcomers from Hong Kong.
NEWS STORY
In the busy Toronto newsroom of Sing Tao Daily,
there's the usual linguistic chaos. I'm one month into a year-long
investigation into the world of Canada's Chinese-language newspapers at
a time when staffers at Sing Tao are facing one of their biggest
competitive tests to date. The challenge: beat out their rivals, Ming
Pao Daily and World Journal, in covering the announcement of which city
will host the 2008 Olympic Summer Games, an event that's of huge
interest to the roughly one million Canadians who are of Chinese
descent. Already, a group of younger newsroom employees, many of them
recent immigrants from the People's Republic of China (PRC), are at work
on a story about the Beijing bid. They talk amongst themselves in their
native Mandarin, a language that the senior editors - old-timers from
Hong Kong and the Canton region who have lived in Canada for decades and
who speak mainly Cantonese - have trouble understanding. The language
difficulties get even worse whenever Sing Tao chairman Andrew Go, who
was born in the Philippines, is in the newsroom. He can follow
Cantonese, but usually talks to staff in English or Mandarin. There's
confusion, and often things have to be repeated. But editors, reporters
and chairman find ways to bridge the language divisions - an ability
that bodes well for the paper's long-term prosperity.
When word arrives of the International Olympic
Committee's decision, staffers mobilize. They're well aware of the deep
split among Chinese-Canadians over the Olympics. Some favour Toronto,
while others are rooting for Beijing out of a sense of ethnic pride.
Sing Tao's headline the next morning is intended to speak to both camps.
Those of their rivals do not. Ming Pao's front page screams:
"Olympic Success: Beijing celebrates through the night." The
World Journal exclaims: "On second attempt, a dream come true for
Beijing." Sing Tao, however, deftly bridges the divisions. Its
headline reads: "Beijing's dream fulfilled; Toronto
heartbroken."
Welcome to Canada's other newspaper war, a war that
has many similarities to its English-language counterpart - and one key
difference. Like the National Post, The Globe and Mail and, in Toronto,
the Star and the Sun, Canada's three Chinese-language dailies, with a
combined readership of almost a half a million people per week, fight it
out on the obvious battlegrounds: editorial stance, circulation methods
and advertiser appeal. But in the war between Sing Tao, Ming Pao and
World Journal, there's one factor the big English-language dailies don't
have to deal with - a dramatic change in immigration patterns that will
make or break them.
Most of us know about the massive influx of wealthy
immigrants to Canada from Hong Kong that began in the mid-1980s. But few
have realized that in the past five years this flow has virtually
stopped. Today, large-scale Chinese immigration comes from the PRC, and
the newcomers are relatively poor. This abrupt change is threatening the
most carefully drawn-up business plans of Canada's three daily Chinese
newspapers. It's what keeps their editors and publishers awake at night,
plotting strategies and counteroffensives. And right now, second-place
Sing Tao has the best shot at grabbing these newcomers, who, if current
trends continue, could number half a million by the end of the decade.
rom his seventh-floor corner office in the Toronto
Star building at the foot of Yonge Street, Sing Tao chairman and Torstar
Corp. executive Andrew Go has a panoramic view of the main Canadian
battlefield. To the northwest is the city's original Chinatown, which
for a century has been the heart of the ethnic economy. The hand
laundries are long gone, but the restaurants, grocers and rooming houses
remain. Two miles to the northeast is a newer Chinatown, a neighbourhood
where one is likely to hear Fuzhounese, the dialect of many of the
recent illegal immigrants. And far to the north and east are the newest
Chinatowns, where the serious Chinese-Canadian money can be found - the
suburban areas of Richmond Hill and Markham, home to the wealthy Hong
Kong émigrés Go had once thought would be his main target market.
Everyone I'd talked to said Go was the man to see if I
had any hope of understanding the history and dynamics of this other
newspaper war. When we meet for the first time, Go, a heavyset man with
silvering hair, is vice-president of Business Ventures at Torstar (he
has since retired from Torstar to focus on Sing Tao and its charitable
foundation). We have an unexpected connection: Go's family is from the
southern Chinese province of Fujian. It's a place I've travelled to
several times during summer breaks from the University of Toronto, where
I teach Chinese history. I've been working on a book on Chinese
families, and though I never came across any Gos in Fujian, now I wish I
had. They would have made a great chapter.
Andrew Go, it turns out, is the scion of a veritable
newspaper dynasty. Early last century, he explains, his grandfather
moved from Fujian to the Philippines, where he found work as a newspaper
editor. Go's father was a publisher, and Andrew himself published two
newspapers in Manila in the '60s and '70s: "My father used to say
there were three great businesses to be in - cigarettes, alcohol and
newspapers - because all three are addictive." Go is a pusher
hooked on his own product. When his papers ran afoul of dictator
Ferdinand Marcos (Go's partner was Benigno Aquino, the prominent
dissident who would be assassinated on Marcos's orders in 1983), he fled
to Canada and found a job at The Toronto Star. He planned to stay six
months. That was 28 years ago.
Go became head of Sing Tao's Canadian operation in
1998, but his ties to the paper go way back. His father had once
published the Philippine edition of Sing Tao (English translation: Star
Island). From Toronto, Andrew Go had watched Sing Tao spread around the
world, becoming, as he calls it, "the world's second international
paper after the International Herald Tribune." In 1997, at Go's
urging, Torstar entered into discussions to acquire the paper's Canadian
operation. Torstar's goal was (and still is) to become "the primary
source of information for the entire Southern Ontario market." This
meant it couldn't ignore the roughly 10% of the Greater Toronto Area
market who are of Chinese descent. A year later, in a deal worth $20
million, Torstar acquired 55% of Sing Tao's Canadian holdings.
By the time Torstar got involved, Sing Tao had already
been in Canada for two decades. According to managing director Herbert
Moon, when a Toronto edition was first set up in 1978, "the market
was stagnant." Back then, there were about 250,000
Chinese-Canadians. But the few Chinese-language papers available to
them, says Andrew Machalski, a consultant who has been tracking the
ethnic media in Canada for more than two decades, were facing what he
calls "the second-generation problem."
Machalski explains that ethnic papers typically follow
a standard business arc: they rise and prosper in sync with immigration
by the ethnic group they serve. If the influx is large, he adds, dozens
of papers may pop up, serving as "tools to facilitate the
integration of the new immigrants, those fresh off the boat, who don't
know their way around the system and have limited English."
Antonio Nicaso, co-editor of the Italian-language
Corriere Canadese, recalls that phase in the Italian-Canadian media in
the mid-20th century. "In those days you had thousands of new
immigrants who needed an Italian daily. But of course," he adds
wistfully, "the situation is different today." Nicaso is
talking about the next stage of the ethnic-paper arc: market shrinkage
as the number of newcomers dwindles and the second generation
integrates. In the Italian-Canadian media, he explains, "the
shrinking market forced consolidation."
By the late 1970s, the Chinese newspaper business had
already entered the downturn phase. That didn't bother the Hong
Kong-based owners of Sing Tao. They thought a Canadian edition could
still make money if it got more news on the street faster (by
piggybacking on its operations in Hong Kong and the U.S.), thereby
forcing out its existing small competitors.
Nowhere in Sing Tao's business plan was there any
expectation that the standard arc would take an abrupt turn upward. But
that's what happened in the wake of December 19, 1984, when Britain
agreed to return Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Suddenly
worried about how the Communist takeover of the colony would affect
them, Hong Kong's elite began to leave. From a trickle in the early
1980s, the number of people arriving here soared to over 44,000 in 1994.
By 1997, over 300,000 had become permanent residents in Canada. Many of
them were wealthy, educated professionals who brought with them several
billion dollars in assets. Albert Yue of Dynasty Advertising recalls
their spending spree: "They found things like real estate or luxury
cars much cheaper than in Hong Kong. They had to make decisions quickly,
so they poured money into the economy."
But they didn't look to English-language media to help
them find those luxury cars. Even though most of the immigrants speak
English, says Yue, 75% of Chinese-Canadians prefer Chinese-language
media. "In a typical week," he adds, "a substantial
percentage are not reached by any English-language media whatsoever,
print, radio or TV." Or, as Machalski explains, "It's the
nostalgia factor. They want news from home that isn't carried by
mainstream media, and they want to read the paper in their own
language." Yue estimates that the desire to reach these consumers
in their own language has created a print-media ad market of at least
$50 million across Canada, mostly in Vancouver and Toronto.
Initially, Sing Tao captured most of this new market.
"The increased migration led to rapid circulation growth, and we
were consistently number one," says Tony Ku, the paper's current
senior editor-in-chief.
Then came competitors with deep pockets. In 1987,
Taiwanese-owned World Journal greatly expanded its existing small,
satellite Canadian operation. In 1993, Hong Kong's Ming Pao entered the
fray. Sing Tao came under assault. The war was on.
World Journal is currently a distant number three in
Canada's Chinese-language newspaper war. It's a different story in the
U.S., where the paper has become a prosperous, influential number one by
successfully riding a previous immigration wave. Its core readership:
emigrants from Taiwan in the years after Richard Nixon's famous 1972
visit to Beijing. The subsequent warming in PRC-American relations badly
shook the confidence of many Taiwanese, who feared an end to the U.S.
guarantee of the island's security. Within a decade, there were more
than half a million émigrés in California alone, and Monterey Park had
become known as Little Taipei and the Chinese Beverly Hills. To serve
this growing market, the United Daily News Group, which operates seven
dailies in Taiwan, set up World Journal in 1976. From the outset, the
paper also sought to build overseas support for Taiwan's ruling
Guomindang government, with which United Daily had close ties, and
influence U.S. policy toward the Communist mainland. Today, World
Journal has become the largest ethnic-language paper in the U.S. Its
circulation of about 350,000 is comparable to that of the Detroit Free
Press.
World Journal's prospects in Canada were never as
bright. Currently, there are about 134,000 immigrants from Taiwan in
Canada, and that number grows by only a few thousand each year. But in
the mid-1980s, the prospect of winning a share of the lucrative new Hong
Kong immigrant market prompted World Journal to expand its existing
branch offices into full-scale Vancouver and Toronto editions.
The gamble never paid off. One reason: language
differences. World Journal's content is written by Mandarin-speakers for
Mandarin-speaking readers. The Hong Kong immigrants speak Cantonese. In
theory, this shouldn't matter much because the written characters of
Chinese vary little across different dialects. The reality is more
complex. Cantonese-speakers can read a newspaper published for Mandarin
readers, and the reverse is also true. But the tone often doesn't seem
right. For Cantonese-speakers, a Mandarin paper is excessively formal,
like reading the news as written by Jane Austen; for Mandarin-speakers,
the Cantonese paper sometimes reads like the news as a hip-hop lyric,
riddled with slang and colloquialisms. As a result, immigrants from Hong
Kong found reading World Journal a tough slog.
Even when they did read it, they found little of
interest. Most of the news and editorials were about Taiwan; there was
only spotty coverage of news, entertainment and business from their old
home - or even their new one. (World Journal only devotes about four of
its approximately 64 pages, about 50% of which are ads, to local
content.)
Accurate circulation numbers for World Journal and its
competitors are surprisingly hard to come by. None of the papers will
release circulation details, and none is audited. According to Alex
Spath of the Canadian Circulation Audit Board, "Advertisers simply
aren't demanding audited circulation figures from the Chinese papers.
They're willing to take the paper's word on it." They also still
refer to a 1999 AC Nielsen-DJC readership survey, which showed World
Journal firmly settled in third place.
Today, World Journal management believes it has a rare
second chance to turn its Canadian operations around. The reason:
potentially half a million new immigrants from the PRC, which in 1998
became Canada's largest source country for newcomers, a position it has
held ever since. Last year, of the roughly 200,000 new immigrants who
arrived here, more than 35,000, or 15% of the total, came from the PRC.
In China, they belonged to the burgeoning middle class that has been
created by a quarter-century of reform since the death of Mao Zedong.
But their savings in Chinese yuan don't amount to much in Canadian
dollars. Nor are their qualifications always enough to get them
white-collar jobs. The legal immigrants are joined by an unknown number
of illegals, as many as 15,000 by some estimates. The illegals may not
show up in official statistics, but they certainly buy and read
newspapers.
To help grab these potential new readers, the World
Journal dispatched veteran Taiwan newspaperman David Ting to Toronto two
years ago. Ting says the new immigrants will naturally be drawn to his
paper: "Most are Mandarin-speakers. They want to read the one paper
that has always targeted a non-Cantonese-speaking audience." But,
he adds, his advantage is not just a difference of dialect. He thinks
the PRC immigrants, who grew up with a state-controlled media,
"will prefer World Journal's more staid, serious journalistic
style." Some experts agree. According to Wanda Gill, who monitored
the Chinese media for market research firm Ipsos-Reid, "World
Journal is seen as an important source for mainland China news."
That may well be so, but the Journal's news is written
from a what's-best-for-Taiwan perspective. Bernard Luk, a York
University historian who has studied the ethnic Chinese press in Canada,
says the paper "has very little editorial independence." In
the buildup to the Olympic decision, for instance, World Journal
hammered away day after day at the PRC's record on human rights, a
policy decision that would have been made by its corporate masters in
Taipei. But the average new immigrant from the PRC has no political axe
to grind with the government back home.
World Journal 's prospects for rising above its
number-three position are also hampered by its small size. Barely
breaking even on estimated revenues of more than $6 million, the paper
doesn't have the money for expanding local coverage, something Ming Pao
and Sing Tao both say they are doing. What's more, it can't afford to
give away free papers to boost circulation or sustain an extensive
home-distribution network, as its two rivals do.
Patrick Fong, president of Can-Asian Advertising,
which was one of the first Chinese-Canadian agencies, thinks World
Journal has little chance of winning this newspaper war. But he doesn't
think it'll die either. "In a small market like this one," he
says, "a business may survive even if it is not viable in terms of
profit and loss. But the owner has to be rich." The implication is
that World Journal's corporate parent is subsidizing the Canadian paper.
For parent United Daily, he adds, owning a newspaper in an overseas
market "has to do with face and political influence," not just
bottom line.
The Pacific Mall in suburban Toronto is a shiny
glass-and-steel testament to the influx of Hong Kong people and capital
in the 1980s and 1990s. With 400 tightly packed shops, it's the largest
Chinese mall in North America, selling everything from ginseng and
Chinese groceries to the latest DVDs and CDs from Hong Kong. The stalls
are arranged in blocks, just like a Hong Kong mall, and to help
customers orient themselves, the narrow passageways between the blocks
have the names of Hong Kong streets - Hennessy, Hollywood, Nathan. At
one shop, Egoland Books, you can rent the current issue of popular
magazines from Hong Kong and Japan for $1 per day. When families gather
at Golden Regency for a big Sunday dim sum meal, the paper of choice is
Ming Pao (English translation: Bright Newspaper). It's a publication
they remember from Hong Kong, where parent Ming Pao Enterprise is a
major media player.
What attracts them are such regular features as a
weekly real-estate supplement (the Property Gold Pages, with listing
upon listing of suburban homes) and the big Sunday edition, which comes
with a hugely successful magazine, loaded with features from Hong Kong.
A typical recent issue included a bio of a Hong Kong actress from the
1960s, an account of the funeral of business magnate Li Ka-shing's
mother-in-law and a cover story on the love life of a Hong Kong singing
star.
Right now, Ming Pao is the most widely read of the
three Chinese-language papers, though because of weaker ad sales its
estimated annual revenues trail those of Sing Tao ($15 million vs. $30
million). Unlike World Journal, it knew exactly what the wealthy new
arrivals from Hong Kong wanted: plenty of news from home. So when Ming
Pao set up shop in Vancouver and Toronto in the early '90s (an earlier
attempt to dislodge Sing Tao in the 1980s had failed miserably), it put
out a large, flashy paper with lots of colour and lots of articles about
the former British colony. The strategy worked. By 1999, according to
the AC Nielsen-DJC survey, Ming Pao had taken the lead in the
circulation battle, with 278,000 readers per week across the country,
compared to 237,000 for Sing Tao and 74,000 for World Journal. (The
numbers are about the same today.) "Ming Pao [did] the right
thing," says Patrick Fong. "Because Sing Tao was
well-established, they had to come up with something different."
That something different attracted advertisers lusting
after a readership who, says Yue, is more "white-collar, managerial
and younger" than Sing Tao's." According to Peter Li, a
sociologist at the University of Saskatchewan who has written on Chinese
consumer markets in Canada, the vast majority of ads in Ming Pao are
"likely targeted to a relatively affluent Chinese consumer
market." Almost half relate to professional services like
investment advice and banking, and another third are for cars, home
decorating, appliances and furniture.
Though Ming Pao is thriving right now, it faces a
significant second-generation problem. The abrupt immigration shift that
brought prosperity to the paper - 75% of whose readers in Toronto,
according to the 1999 ACNielsen-DJC survey, listed Hong Kong as their
last permanent residence - has changed again. With Beijing mostly living
up to its promise to govern Hong Kong with a light touch, and with its
economy continuing to hum, emigration from the former British colony has
dried up. With few new immigrants from Hong Kong, and little chance that
the children of existing émigrés will have that much interest in
"the old country," Ming Pao knows it needs to find new readers
fast.
Ming Pao's editorial director, Ka-ming Lui, who
arrived from Hong Kong in 1995, says he's readying for the wave from the
PRC.
He recognizes that the paper's earlier strategy of
providing large amounts of news from home can't be used to win over the
arrivals. "Canada today looks a lot like Hong Kong in the
'50s," he says. "At that time, you had lots of emigrants from
all over China - legal migrants and illegals, migrants from the north,
from the south, from Shanghai and so on." One paper couldn't have
possibly satisfied all the demands for news from home, he adds. "Do
you give them news from Canton, or news from Beijing?"
The answer, says Lui, who also oversees the paper's
U.S. edition, is to win over the new immigrants by increasing local
coverage. "That's what draws people. Every immigrant worries about
getting his kid into a good school. We run lots of education stories to
meet that need." Ming Pao also has a strong focus on crime
reporting, especially incidents that involve Chinese-Canadians. The
coverage can get lurid. They use standard graphics for stories, like the
one about Tina Wu, a Taiwanese student murdered in Toronto in 2000,
which featured a burly arm grasping a blood-smeared knife. Sensational
presentation, says Patrick Fong, "is another big part of Ming Pao's
distinctiveness, its competitive edge."
But like World Journal, Ming Pao's capacity to
reinvent itself is limited. It can't afford to alienate its core
readership. As assistant general manager Jeannie Lee puts it, "We
come from Hong Kong and our base is in Hong Kong. We have our base
format and we don't want to lose our current readers." While Ming
Pao (like Sing Tao) has stripped the news pages of any Cantonese
colloquialisms, the same is not true for the features. And for all Lui's
talk of greater local coverage, only five pages of a typical 88-page
issue are dedicated to Canadian news (two news and sports, three in
entertainment). What dominates the paper are those Hong Kong-centred
features that, says York University's Luk, are of little interest to
many of the PRC newcomers and are written in a Cantonese style they find
unfamiliar.
Patrick Fong, though, offers some hope for Ming Pao's
continued prosperity. He thinks the PRC immigrants, especially younger
ones, may gradually develop an interest in what's going on in Hong Kong.
After all, he says, "Hong Kong is the source of Chinese pop culture
today. And pop culture is like potato chips - you know they're bad for
you, but once you start eating them, it's hard to stop."
To get them hooked, Ming Pao is employing a tactic
used by its counterparts in the English-language newspaper war: giving
the paper away to potential new readers. An ad invites "new
immigrant friends" to present their papers at Ming Pao's offices,
and receive a free three-month subscription.
ust a few blocks to the west of Andrew Go's downtown
Toronto office is the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, which on this
spring day is playing host to the Chinese Business Expo and Conference.
Daisy Wai explains why she organized it: "Canada's economic future
is going to be increasingly tied to the PRC. You need to know who are
the right people to do business with in China," she says, "and
the new wave of immigrants are very well-connected."
Canada's three Chinese-language papers hope to make
their own connections here. They all have a presence. Sing Tao, as
befits its strategy to go after the newcomers aggressively, provided
$15,000 worth of ads, enough to make it a Gold Sponsor of the event, and
is distributing free papers.
As at most trade shows, there's an odd mix of
exhibitors: Bank of Montreal and Rogers Cable are here, and so is the
Canadian inventor of a chiropractic pillow, who is looking for a Chinese
manufacturer. The people wandering the exhibit hall are a mix, too; one
that testifies to the new diversity of Chinese Canada. You can tell
who's who from their shoes. Most of the Hong Kong and Taiwan Chinese are
in suits with black Oxfords or in business-casual with suede walking
shoes. And then there are the people in tennis shoes. They are the new
immigrants, people who may know all the tricks that are used to signify
status in the PRC, but have yet to learn the intricacies of business
etiquette in Canada.
Tony Ku, a senior Sing Tao editor, remembers exactly
what it feels like to arrive in a new country. He came to Toronto from
Peru with his family and his life savings, about US$25,000, in 1978. In
the early days, he had sole responsibility for all of the paper's local
content. That meant copying a few columns from the local English
newspapers, translating them and sending them off to New York, where
Sing Tao was assembled and printed. Today, his editorial staff of 35
produce 12 pages of Toronto news per day. He is also able to access a
list of The Toronto Star's upcoming stories, and decides which ones his
team will translate and publish. The Torstar exclusives, he explains,
give Sing Tao a serious edge in local news. An Ipsos-Reid survey that
Andrew Go commissioned last year illustrates that Chinese-Canadians rank
Sing Tao as the clear leader in local news and entertainment coverage.
The Sing Tao-Torstar synergy is also paying off in the
area of distribution. By 1998, the paper's distribution system had come
a long way from the days when Wong Wai Man picked up the entire Toronto
edition off the overnight Greyhound from New York and distributed it to
a handful of Chinatown shops. Today, Sing Tao sells most of its copies
at more than 600 retail "drops" in Toronto. This creates some
distinctive problems for Wong, who is now Toronto circulation manager.
Some of the drops are gas stations, so sales rise and fall with
fluctuations in the price of gas. Also, picking up returns is so
expensive that Wong tries to ensure a sellout at every drop, which means
some readers who want the paper can't get it.
Like Ming Pao, Sing Tao has a large number of readers
from the former British colony (46% of its circulation, according to
Go). But it has a much higher percentage of readers from the PRC (47%).
"Spending power is still concentrated among the Hong Kong
immigrants," says Moon. "We need to give the PRC migrants some
time to settle down before they can really help
the market." So Sing Tao has no plans to cut back on Hong Kong
coverage. In fact, in January, the paper launched Star Magazine, a
Sunday features supplement designed to compete with Ming Pao's popular
Sunday edition. Star Magazine's content is licensed (at a hefty price,
say observers) from Next, the most popular weekly magazine in Hong Kong.
Herbert Moon calls the changing mix of the immigrant
population "our biggest issue in positioning in the next three to
five years." Unlike Ming Pao's Lui, he plans to increase coverage
of China to win new readers, something he can do at relatively low cost
because of Sing Tao's ownership, split between Toronto and Hong Kong. In
January 2001, Global China Technology, the company that now owns Sing
Tao in Hong Kong, formed a joint venture with China's
government-controlled New China (Xinhua) News Agency to generate Chinese
content. But getting it from a government source is certainly a
departure from that of most ethnic newspapers in Canadian history. After
all, it's unlikely that émigré papers for, say, Russian immigrants to
Canada ever took material from Pravda.
Sing Tao's real edge in this newspaper war lies
precisely in its ability to reach out to all the different groups in the
Chinese-Canadian community, including the newest element. Advertisers
who want to reach the newcomers from the PRC have already taken note.
Take driving schools, for example. Private cars were virtually unknown
in the PRC until recently, so unlike the older wave from Hong Kong, most
of the new immigrants don't know how to drive. On a typical day, Sing
Tao runs two full pages of driving-school
advertisements, with 10 times as many ads as in Ming
Pao or World Journal. It's the same story for services like language
schools, computer training, immigration lawyers - services that rely
mainly on the new immigrant market. More and more of the ads in Sing Tao
are written in the simplified characters used on the mainland, a clear
indication of their target.
It's not just small business that sees Sing Tao as the
best vehicle for reaching the new arrivals. Big advertisers like
Canada's long-distance carriers are also aware of the market
segmentation. In Ming Pao, for example, ads usually give the low
per-minute rate to Hong Kong top billing, while in World Journal the
Taiwan rate is prominently displayed. But when Primus, for example,
advertises in Sing Tao, the big number in 48-point type that it often
showcases is the per-minute cost of calls to the PRC.
Sing Tao's most effective weapon for winning this
newspaper war may just be its overwhelming dominance in the most humble
part of the paper: the classified section. Even though it has the most
expensive classified ads of any of the three papers ($50.25 per
45-character unit per week versus $28 at Ming Pao and $17 at World
Journal), Sing Tao gets far more ads than its rivals. How much more?
About 900 ads per day, on five pages, about two or three times as many
as Ming Pao and World Journal.
The reasons for Sing Tao's primacy in classified
harken back to an earlier phase of the arc of the ethnic newspaper, a
time when newspapers helped ease the transition of working-class,
non-English-speaking new immigrants into Canadian society. When older
immigrants, those who had already made good, were looking for people to
rent beds in their rooming houses, for waiters and dishwashers for their
restaurants and for workers for their laundries and groceries, Sing Tao
was where they placed their ads. As Patrick Fong puts it,
"Classifieds were the very first kind of advertising, back in the
stone age of advertising. And Sing Tao owns that type of ad. It's part
of the brand equity of the paper." The wealthy and educated
immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan, the core readership of Ming Pao
and World Journal, didn't rent space in rooming houses or work in
restaurants. So the new entries on the market never bothered to
challenge Sing Tao for control of the classifieds.
Today, Ming Pao is trying hard to catch-up. A source
at Sing Tao claims that the competition has even tried, without success,
to plunder classifieds by responding to each ad individually and
offering incentives to the advertiser to switch. (Ming Pao's Jeannie Lee
emphatically denies this, saying her advertising team engages in
"standard telemarketing.") Last year, Ming Pao launched a
Monday supplement aimed at the new immigrants. Its ad categories,
heavily discounted, are immigration consultants, computer schools, used
cars and resale realty. There's been interest from advertisers, but
classified advertisers just didn't bite, prompting Ming Pao to drop the
classifieds. The difficulty, says Fong, "is habitual action. People
go with the paper that is most established. It's a problem of
inertia." What this means, he adds, is that "if you are a new
immigrant, without a lot of access to information, people will tell you
to read Sing Tao."
One new immigrant who has found this out for himself
is Mou Yimin (not his real name). Mou left his home in Fuzhou in 1998,
entered Canada illegally and filed a claim for refugee status. A farmer
in China, Mou now works as casual labour for Toronto contractors. His
life, though, is anything but casual. He lives in a Chinatown rooming
house, upstairs from a grocer. A single cot takes up half his room.
Beside it is a small table on which he keeps his clothes, photos of his
wife and kids back in China, and the rice cooker and hot plate on which
he cooks his supper. The ads for cars and houses in Ming Pao and World
Journal hold little appeal for him. "I'm here by myself, trying to
make a living," he says. "I buy some rice. I buy some
vegetables. What else would I buy?" The paper he reads is Sing Tao.
"Of course we newcomers read Sing Tao - you read the paper to find
a job, or to find a place to live, and Sing Tao has the most ads for
things like that." Mou Yimin knows that he is going to make it in
this country. He's already taken a driving test three times, in
anticipation of the day he will buy a second-hand car. Someday soon,
he'll repay the snakehead who arranged his passage. He'll bring his
family, and start a life here. And if Andrew Go's strategy is right,
Sing Tao will be part of that life, a "Chinese Yellow Pages"
for Mou and people like him, the fastest growing segment of the
Chinese-Canadian population. - By
Michael Szonyi National
Post Magazine cover feature July
2002
