Comprehensive News Weekly

Many comprehensive news weeklies started publication in 2004, which helps to make newspaper market prosperous. Unfortunately, the development of these newspapers is unsatisfactory. In view of this situation, this article explores their realistic reason of development and their development space in future. Taking South Weekly, The Bund, New Weekly, Chengdu Times Weekly as samples, the author does case studies on them and sums up the inherent causes of the low development of comprehensive news weeklies. Finally, the author focuses on general problems on these newspapers and makes operative suggestions on their development.The article is in six parts.In the first part, the author defines comprehensive news weekly to be studied in this article, and analyzes the status quo of this kind of newspaper, points out that the current situation of comprehensive news weekly appears four features such as small market share in newspaper market, exclusively predominant position of South Weekly, new investment in silence, and stronger market competition.The second part summaries four features of comprehensive news weeklies, namely, profit-driven management background, mainstream and advanced market positioning, key competitive force of depth and viewpoint, aim of newspaper impact.The third part discusses the causes for current development of comprehensive news weekly from macro level, midlevel and micro level, and provides realisticinterpretation of the investments in the market of comprehensive news weekly in these two years. In the macro level, China's development and reform in politics and economy fosters many readers for comprehensive news weeklies. In the midlevel, strong competition impels capitals to leave the saturated market and turn to the less developed market of comprehensive news weekly. In the micro level, experiences and personnel accumulated by South Weekly and other news weeklies lay foundation for the development of comprehensive news weekly.The fourth part does theoretic discussion on the development space of comprehensive new weekly in future. From a view of newspaper economics, and combined with collected data, the author analyses the reader market, advertisement market and product market of comprehensive weekly. The author concludes that this kind of newspaper still has large development space. To be accepted by market, however, it is challenged by fostering of reader groups, development of advertisement market.Based on case studies on South Weekly, The Bund, New Weekly, Chengdu Times Weekly, the author points out the causes that impede the development of comprehensive news weekly as follows: the lack of capital, failure to grasp policy, brain drain, simplistic means of advertisement management, low rate of issuance arrival. All these problems slow the development of comprehensive news weekly in the present condition.In the sixth part, to solve these problems, the author makes operative suggestion from aspects of the quality of newspaper and the efficiency of management.