a shameful waste of madhouse time

This magazine, considered a national level magazine, has been discovered by
some plucky reporters at the Youth Daily to be quite amenable to the idea that
you can publish something as long as you pay for it. Of course, not everything in the magazine–or rather, not all the space is up for sale, but you can certainly write a fluff piece about the CEO of your company, for the firesale price of 1rmb/character. They let you throw in a couple of nice pics to alleviate the boredom of your no doubt tendentious and overwrought spin prose. This was discovered when the Youth Daily went “undercover” and later, when they confronted the magazine’s editors about this more openly, the editors said “well you know how it is, we are in the same business, after all. This kind of thing happens everywhere.”

Of course it does, but on the other hand, paying money to get stuff published is the cardinal sin to the fourth estate, or at least should be. The problem is that everyone else is getting rich off what they have–their brains, their land, their looks, their talent–so if what you’ve got by way of resources are the pages of a nationally read magazine, then why not try to turn a buck off it?

However, they prefer that you write it. Then they give you some certificate and then you take that to the bank and wire them the money. It’s all rather painless. However if you need one of their journalists to write it for you, you’ve got to offer a down payment of at least 5000 rmb.