Beijing Morning Post tarts it up

Beijing Morning Post
January 9, 2008

Today's Beijing Morning Post leads with new eco-friendly regulations that will ban ultra-thin plastic bags starting June 1. The rules, published yesterday by the State Council, will also require retailers to charge regular plastic bags instead of simply giving them away to customers.

The second headline reports that twelve Chinese died and another was badly injured in an explosion at a freezer facility in Seoul, Korea. This is a follow-up to the first report of the accident that ran in yesterday's paper.

Today's main photo shows a woman from Anhui expressing her gratitude for her lawyer's help in winning a substantial settlement. The client's husband lost both his legs in a Beijing subway accident three years ago, and the case has dragged on since that time. The Xicheng Intermediate Court ordered the Beijing Subway Group to pay 800,000 yuan in compensation; the defendant said it would reserve the right to appeal.

Other headlines:

• A typo was found on first-day commemorative envelopes for the upcoming Year of the Rat. The scene 老鼠嫁女 ("the rat takes a wife") had 属, "category," in place of the homophonous 鼠, "rat";
• New English names for six famous Beijing brands were made public yesterday. The names are intended to be informative, so a business description and date of establishment are appended to the Pinyin, which on its own is meaningless to foreign tourists. The brands include "Quanjude Peking Roast Duck - Since 1864" (全聚德), "Tongrentang Chinese Medicine - Since 1669" (同仁堂), and "Rongbaozhai Art Gallery - Since 1672" (荣宝斋).

But that's not today's real front page, at least as far as newsstand customers are concerned. In an attempt to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack, the Beijing Morning Post now comes in a single-page wrapper that presents headlines and photos in a colorful layout.

Beijing Morning Post wrapper

Even when their headlines tend toward the sensationalistic, maninland newspapers tend to be fairly conservative in their layout. The Beijing Morning Post's new "reader's guide" (导读版), as the wrapper calls itself, is considerably more eye-catching, and features a half-page composite image of Tsui Hark and the three stars of his next film. The bottom half of the page displays a collection of today's headlines.

Yesterday's wrapper was even more sensational: a three-quarter-page photo of the Yuzhan bus accident, another image of the aftermath of a freezer explosion in Korea, and a massive headline about a narrowly-averted exchange of fire between the US and Iran.

According to the advertiser information box on the back of the page, the wrapper (which is unnumbered and not technically part of the newspaper) is intended to increase retail circulation—it's not being distributed to subscribers—and is targeted at commuters. The back of the page, when not covered in advertising, will carry comic strips and interesting entertainment or lifestyle snippets.

A few other Beijing newspapers have done the wrapper thing in the past. The First regularly distributes a poster of a sports star along with the paper, and The Beijing News occasionally comes wrapped in a real estate ad. But the Beijing Morning Post is the first to wrap itself up in a lurid, Hong Kong style cover.