In China, an Editor Triumphs, and Fails

A quiet man with a youthful face, Cheng threw himself into the project, studying newspapers around the world, writing a 10,000-word plan of action and personally designing the tabloid's masthead using 5th century calligraphy from the Northern Wei dynasty. His wife had just had a baby, but it was the newspaper he doted on.

The newspaper employed fewer than a hundred reporters then, and Cheng edited and laid out several pages each night. He also pioneered a new genre of journalism in China, writing reviews of the foreign films that were becoming widely available on video CDs.

The newspaper bled money at first, and Cheng's bosses had their doubts. In one meeting, Cheng argued it would soon become Guangzhou's top newspaper. His audience burst out laughing, colleagues recalled.

But Cheng kept pushing. The paper became the first in China to offer daily consumer sections -- automobiles on Monday and real estate on Thursday, for example. It broke new ground with blowout coverage of World Cup finals in 1998, publishing eight pages a day for 43 consecutive days to the delight of this soccer-crazed nation.

The newspaper also began to distinguish itself with more critical reporting on such social problems as crime and corruption, causing a sensation, for example, with a report on restaurants that used cooking oil extracted from kitchen waste.

While other newspapers avoided angering local officials by muckraking only in other provinces, the Daily focused on hard-hitting reporting in its own city and region.

The strategy worked. Circulation climbed from 80,000 at the end of 1997 to 380,000 a year later. After a talented, young advertising manager, Yu Huafeng, joined the staff, revenues jumped, too. In its third year, circulation reached 610,000 and the paper eked out its first profit.

By 2000, the Southern Metropolis Daily had become both the thickest and most expensive daily newspaper in China, charging about 12 cents for 72 pages. The next year, the party promoted Cheng to editor in chief. Yu became a top deputy and the paper's general manager. The average age of the Daily's 2,200 employees was 27 in 2002. The average age of the members of its senior management was 33.

The newspaper was pugnacious. Once, local officials in the neighboring city of Shenzhen tried to banish it from its newsstands. The next day, a headline on the paper's front page declared, "Someone in Shenzhen Shamelessly Shut Out This Newspaper." A month and a half later, the ban was lifted.

Colleagues described Cheng as an eloquent speaker. At weekly staff meetings, he urged his reporters to remember they were working for the public. In one memo, a reporter recalled, he criticized an article describing the problems caused by the city's prostitutes. He said the paper should sympathize with the weak and concentrate on "supervising" the strong.

"In the newspaper business, we have already learned how to be out of power," Cheng said in an interview distributed by the paper's marketing department in 2002. "Now, we must learn how to act like a newspaper that is in power."

Cheng said the party had given the press a mandate to monitor local officials. But he said he also picked his targets carefully. "In China, supervision by the media can only proceed within the existing system," he said. "Freedom means knowing how big your cage is."

A Brief Victory

A few days after Chen Feng was hired as a reporter at the Southern Metropolis Daily in late March last year, he received a hot tip. A college student told him she had heard that a 27-year-old graphic designer named Sun Zhigang had died in police custody after being detained for failing to carry his temporary residence permit.

Chen was worried the story might be too sensitive. But without hesitating, his editor gave him permission to investigate, he recalled.