It’s lunch time now, but once again my daily newspaper has not arrived. I used to quickly scan the Shanghai Daily every morning when having my first cup of coffee. But lately the paper is arriving later and later, and it sort of has become an afternoon newspaper. We checked what was happening, and were told that they have a distribution problem. It will be at least another week before this will be solved (read: likely next month the paper will still be late). I am not sure if this is only a problem in my area (Xujiahui) or in bigger parts of Shanghai.

The Shanghai Daily is very lucky that there is no competition from other English newspapers (The China Daily is no real competition as they are still stuck in the 1990’s, mainly copying the Party’s press statements and adding posts from weblogs without even giving credit to the author), because in a more competitive environment they would have lost most of their readers a long time ago. But if they continue their delivery like this I might as well consider a subscription to the South China Morning Post. This HK newspaper is maybe not as good as it used to be, but at least it has decent reporting. It arrives around 4 or 5 PM on weekdays, so not much later than the Shanghai Daily right now. I hope the SCMP will be available in an iLiad format soon, so that I can read it in the morning already. Amy Gu, if you are reading this, is this wishful thinking? Maybe you can bring this up with the SCMP management, it can potentially gain your paper a lot of additional readers – and fame by being one of the first papers to offer this format.