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Magazines
Girl dead at 22Posted by Joel Martinsen, November 27, 2008 12:23 PM
![]() Girl, December 2008 Girl (少女) was founded in 1987 as a general-interest magazine aimed at teens, one of the earliest of its type. Now, after 222 issues and nearly 22 years, its final issue appears on newsstands this month. The editor-in-chief has left Shanghai People's Publishing House, which ran Girl, and the rest of the staff have been transferred to other positions in-house. A sad day for the magazine's employees and readership, to be sure, but the rest of the industry has already moved on: Girl's demise frees up a precious license that will be reassigned to some lucky publication. GAPP is well aware of this. Today's China Press and Publishing Journal quotes Zhang Zeqing, deputy director of GAPP's newspapers and journals division, who pinpoints the problem:
How badly has it been held back? The article also quotes China Periodicals Association head Shi Feng, who notes that between 1978 and 1985, total annual periodical circulation rose from 762 million to 2.56 billion copies. Yet in the two decades since, total circulation stagnated and only broke 3 billion in 2007. Whether that number is reachable this year is still an open question. Girl started printing in color in 1998 and launched a mobile-phone edition in 2006. Ultimately, however, a low-end magazine (4 yuan cover price) is limited in what it can do to keep subscribers interested, particularly when production costs jump, as National Business Daily reports:
Century Wenjing publishes the popular Alice (爱丽丝) book series, launched in late 2007 by Guo Jingming's former collaborators. Conventional wisdom says that Alice will take over Girl's license, making it a legitimate periodical rather than a magazine published under a book license. Links and Sources
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Comments on Girl dead at 22
Two of my favorite magazines were 童话大王 and 故事会. Yuanjie Zheng's fairy tales were something you (as a 80') should not miss.