June 3, 2008
What’s today’s top news story? According to the Yangtse Evening Post, it’s the fact that the Yangtse Evening Post is one of China’s top 500 brands.
The stop-the-presses excitement conveyed by the front-page headline (and the title of the story inside: “The words ‘Yangtse Evening Post’ are worth 4.755 billion’) would be understandable if this were a major accomplishment for the newspaper, but in this case, the story’s not even news: according to the subhead text, the Yangtse Evening Post brand sits at #154 overall, up 13 from last year. In fact, the paper has been ranked in the top 500 for each of the past five years, ever since the World Brand Lab rankings were first issued.
Forty-eight national media brands made the list. Here’s how the top 15 stacked up (values are in billions of yuan):
3. CCTV (中央电视台): 82.425
33. Phoenix TV (凤凰卫视): 23.429
108. People’s Daily (人民日报): 6.532
109. Reference News (参考消息): 6.521
110. Guangzhou Daily (广州日报):
116. Yangcheng Evening News (羊城晚报): 6.198
126. Hunan TV (湖南卫视): 5.752
130. Xinmin Evening News (新民晚报): 5.739
132. Jiangsu TV (江苏广电总台): 5.631
146. Southern Daily (南方日报): 4.896
147. Shenzhen Special Zone Daily (深圳特区报): 4.887
154. Yangtse Evening Post (扬子晚报): 4.755
170. Economic Daily (经济日报): 4.298
172. Beijing Evening News (北京晚报): 4.289
184. Duzhe (读者): 4.083
The real lead story today was a fire in a vendor’s stall underneath the famed Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing. The fire blazed for more than an hour before firefighters were able to extinguish it, at which point they discovered that it had caused significant damage to the underside of the bridge. The paper quoted a 60-year-old woman who reported a rumor that the fire was sparked by a mosquito coil, but this was not confirmed by firefighters.
In other headlines, a fire broke out at Universal Studios in Hollywood, Jiangsu has found no cases of the human immunoglobulin that killed six in Jiangxi, and Jiangsu TV will air a live broadcast of the NBA finals.