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SCMP Reporter

To Media Eye's discerning gaze, the girls are showing more skin and gossip abounds on the pages of Hong Kong magazines as they search for desperately needed circulation growth.

Just before Lunar  New Year, Next Media's junior weekly title for teenage readers, Easy Finder, cut its cover price from $12 to $10, a sure sign that it is feeling the strain of battle as it attempts to head off competition in the fierce youth magazine market and from the internet.

And according to one media observer, the price cut proves girls and gossip are not a sure-fire recipe for holding circulation, let alone increasing readership.

Market sources say the magazine, which 10 years ago was selling 170,000 copies, has slipped below the 100,000-copy benchmark.

It is now selling about 90,000 copies a week.

It is believed the cut will cost Next Media $180,000 in circulation revenue each week, and a total of $9.36 million over the year's 52 issues.

Easy Finder, which helped Next Media get back-door listing status in 1999, was one of the group's most profitable titles.

'The weekly needs to survive, and so has cut the cover price. But it should have negative impact on its profitability,' a Next Media insider said.

But market watchers are not so sure.

The title blurred its distinctive market position as a young and trendy title since  adopting a gossip and tabloid style approach last year, according to a market observer.

'It was Next Media's chairman Jimmy Lai Chee-ying's idea to change the editorial direction of Easy Finder,' the insider told Media Eye.

But it seems a dangerous move, given that in this market segment it  competes against stablemate Sudden Weekly and  Albert Yeung Sau-shing's Oriental Sunday.

And while readers may be confused by this change in direction, advertisers are not, choosing instead to place their advertisements in distinctly youth-orientated titles, such as Milk and East Touch.

'Easy Finder is no longer a weekly for youngsters; I don't know what its market position is now,' the observer said.

'Young people aged 15 to 25 love to stick to the internet for chatting and gaming. Will they spend $10 for the weekly? The answer is 'No'.

'If Easy Finder's circulation is not boosted by the price cut, further price cuts will follow because Mr Lai's sole aim is to keep market share,' the observer said.

BLOGGERAMA

It is a meeting of the old and the new ... and it is hot.

It is media convergence, the convergence of a portal and a radio station.

Media Eye likes nothing better than browsing the internet with radio.

Radio and the internet are the old and the new of mass media communications.

While it is general opinion that teenagers have forsaken reading books, magazines and newspapers for online chatting and games, even that is old hat now.

The hottest online ambition for Hong Kong youngsters now is to become a blogger - a person who writes his or her own story on a personal website, namely a blog, to share with other web surfers.

Embattled Radio Television Hong Kong has launched a radio programme, Midnight Blogger, to introduce blog sites worth reading.

Yahoo! Hong Kong, which has launched its beta version of the Blog service, has teamed up with RTHK to promote blogs. Popular bloggers on the top 10  blog sites may get the chance to chat with Midnight host Jonathan Yip.

'It is a cross media partnership that is mutually beneficial,' said Yip, adding that he hoped his audience would try the blog and that bloggers would tune in to the programme.

The first blogger on air was a flight stewardess named Cap who, through her site Hong Kong and Outport, writes about her in-flight experiences and  travelling the world.

'The hit rate of the Hong Kong and Outport blog rose to over 10,000 times a day after the writer Cap was on air,' Yip told Media Eye.

Hong Kong and Outport has recorded more than 380,000 hits since its launch in November.

frederick.yeung@scmp.com



Jimmy Lai finds the teen mag market anything but easy