Hope springs eternal for Asia's English weeklies

In the early days of this blog, we wrote a few times about the demise of English publishing across Asia as Dow Jones shuttered the old FEER not too long after Time pulled the plug on Asiaweek. About six months ago, we reported on a brave effort by Jasper Becker in Beijing to revive the genre with Asia Weekly.

On Time's The China Blog, Simon Elegant does a good round-up of the trend. Becker is not alone in his endeavour. Elegant highlights two other publications, each taking a different route:

Another magazine by the name of Review Asia, a monthly published out of Manila and featuring a number of well know names as columnists, has also thrown its hat into the ring, apparently sharing Becker's view that many of the 210,000 readers FEER and Asiaweek boasted when they folded are still out there and eager for more.

This one is so resolutely old-fashioned that it doesn't even appear to have a web site. The other takes the opposite tack:

Elsewhere, a group of somewhat grizzled but equally respected journalists are behind a completely different vision: Asia Sentinel, an exclusively online magazine. Not only does it eschew an actual printed edition, Asia Sentinel also differs from Asia Weekly in content. The latter is largely a filtering service for those interested in the region but too busy to wade through the tons of information flooding at them each day, featuring clippings from other publications and roundups, Asia Sentinel in contrast has a very definite, sharp and often entertaining point of view.

I have long held the view that there is a business opportunity here, just not a very big one and one that isn't big enough for large US corporations. What killed Asiaweek and FEER was not really lack of demand in the market, but corporate overheads. It should be possible to run a business profitably on revenues in excess of US$20 million. But, it isn't when you're subsidising First Class trans-pacific air fares for squadrons of publishers looking to replicate New York expense accounts in Asia.

My fear for the new ventures is that, if any of them is successful, they will be acquired in due course by a major international player who will then slowly strangle them with overhead.