Not worth the paper it’s printed on

At the end of last week the Beijing postal service was crowing about a new circulation record set by the Beijing Evening News. The 26 April issue of that paper contained 208 pages which, at a circulation of 650,000, weighed in at 400 tons. That issue was a pre-May First special edition that was boosted by additional sections for Labor Day tourism and health; it broke last November’s record of 132 pages to become the thickest issue in the history of the Beijing Evening News. The paper publishes 48 pages in a normal issue.

But as the post office was congratulating itself on successful delivery, non-subscribers were having a hard time getting their hands on the paper. From The Beijing News:

Yesterday, [26 April], city resident Mr. Ma visited ten newsstands in succession from Di’anmen to Dongsi shitiao, but was unable to buy a copy of Beijing Evening News. Later he discovered that one newsstand held a stack of Beijing Evening News nearly half a meter tall, so he suspected that the newsstand was hoarding the papers to get higher revenue.

Mr. Ma said at one newsstand, he heard someone inside say, “Such a thick paper; it’ll be worth more to sell it as scrap.” He dialed the number of Beijing Evening News circulation and the employee on the other end said that it had received responses from readers at 2pm that the paper was unavailable at some newsstands.

Yesterday at 6pm, the reporter scored a copy of Beijing Evening News, and then weighed it on a supermarket’s vegetable scale. It weighed 486 grams, which at scrap prices would is worth nearly 0.6 yuan.

Yesterday at 8pm, a newsstand near Ciqikou on Liangguang Road had a half-meter high stack of Beijing Evening News papers, but the boss said that his papers were already sold out; the papers stacked at the door were put there by someone else and could not be sold. The newsstand boss also said that at 4pm, when his stock of Beijing Evening News papers were almost out, someone came by to collect the papers, and asked for 300 copies.

Beijing Evening News has a cover price of 0.5 yuan, less than its value as scrap. Beijing Youth Daily ran an article that calculated the paper’s weight at 550 grams, worth around 0.7 yuan. A newsstand boss said that this happens once or twice a year – a normal occurrence rather than the price wars that rocked newspaper distribution in Kunming last year.

Some Beijing newspapers have avoided this problem by bumping up cover prices on thick special issues, but Lifestyle (精品购物指南), at 256 pages, weighed in at roughly 1kg this week and still sold for the usual 1 yuan, which represents around one-fifth of its true cost.