Hong Kong Economic Journal has launched their online edition at last! HKEJ is by far the best Chinese newspaper. Finally I can access their articles from US. They must have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out a business model to sustain the web edition and at the same time maintain the business of the traditional paper. It is on their 35th anniversary, under the diminishing business climate for tradition newspaper that they finally tread into online world.

Like most Hong Kong newspaper's website, they charge a subscription fee. The annual rate is just HKD398 right now, which I paid without second thought. They website is clean and quite well organized. This is a rather great contrast to other Chinese website, which tend to have dense clutter of materials and flashy graphics. It seems they are able to carry over the same clean design of the paper edition into the web. There are forum for users to comment on articles. The volume of comment is modest so far. I have high hope that eventually they can tend the forums into lively and high quality conversations. Another curious thing is that there are only very very few advertisements. I hope this is because the website is new and not because of lack of interest from advertisers.

All in all I am very excited about this. I hope the Hong Kong Economic Journal will continue to flourish both online and offline.

2008.07.03 comments