Steven Irvine is the Founder / CEO / Editor at Week in China and has worked in the media industry for more than two decades, having interviewed luminaries around the world, including top politicians in the United Kingdom and business tycoons in China. Telum Media recently caught up with him on the latest developments of Week in China.

Week in China will celebrate its 13^th anniversary in January. What motivated you to set up Week in China?
Prior to setting up Week in China I was the Editor-in-Chief of FinanceAsia for almost nine years. Before that I’d been posted to Hong Kong from the UK as Asia Editor of Euromoney. I started to have the conviction that every conversation I was having seemed to have a China dimension. My wife, who was working for a big US investment bank doing corp comms on China, would talk about all the corporate stories she’d read in the local Chinese press, and it struck me there was no coverage of these topics in international English language media sources.

I came up with the concept for a weekly product that would come out each Friday and give business executives and investors around the world an easy-to-read digest of all the key economic and corporate news from China, citing local media sources. The plan was for it to take about 30-45 minutes to read each Friday afternoon. HSBC liked the idea too and came in as the sponsor and invited its global corporate and fund management client base to subscribe.

What does Week in China focus on?
Over the years our subscriber base grew to around 20,000, targeting a demographic of international decision-makers interested in China. We have a web-based archive today of over 8,000 articles covering over 1,600 companies and their activities in China. Some of those we’ve covered are multinationals who have sought success in the vast China market, but the majority were local firms. In many cases we were the first English language publication to hone in on a unicorn firm, such as Xiaomi which we first wrote about in 2011.

Our mission has been to help our readers “understand China better” and to “tell China’s fast-evolving and dynamic story” week by week. Every issue is like a new chapter in a book that never ends!

I’d say in any given 20-page issue of our weekly digital publication, about half our content would cover ‘China Consumer’ and ‘Internet and Tech’ content these days.
Aside from our weekly magazine we have also published books that help our audience understand China better. Our most recent book is An A-Z of Chinese History. Our books can be downloaded from our website.

How has Week in China’s unique selling proposition changed over time?
I think over the past couple of years our ‘unique selling point’ has become our editorial neutrality. With many media sources increasingly polarised in their China coverage (i.e. very anti or very pro), our genuine attempts to retain balanced coverage is valued more than ever.

Have you launched anything new this year?
Yes, we launched our Top 50 China Unicorns Ranking in the first quarter as a way of helping our global readership keep track of these fast-growing and highly influential firms. We updated the ranking each quarter and created a standalone site to host it where we have written profiles of the 50 unicorn companies. For those who are interested in finding out more about these companies, the URL is: www.weekinchina.com/unicorns/

How can PRs work with you to create a win-win situation for everyone? What topics interest you and your team most?
Over the past few years we have put a greater focus on conducting original Q&As. These are interviews with experts who share their experiences of doing business in China. Our latest Q&A in July was with the Helsinki-based CEO of elevator and escalator giant KONE. In a lengthy five-page Q&A we gave him room to tell (in full) his company’s incredible China growth story – KONE now has 20,000 staff spread across 600 Chinese cities and towns. The interview had high engagement levels: the average time spent reading it was close to 12 minutes.

I would like to use this opportunity to reach out to Telum’s large readership of PRs that we are primed and ready to run more such Q&As. If a company has a good China story to tell, we’ll give ample column inches to allow it to be told in full. I can be reached at stevenirvine@weekinchina.com