It is not enough to upgrade your existing products, although this is an essential step to secure progress and good monetization efforts.

However, in newsrooms where the future is at the heart of all planning, new product development takes center stage.

Such is the case at the South China Morning Post, a newspaper that I am honored to have called my client, and which I watch closely, as it continues to carve a niche for itself, capitalizing on its main asset: China is its backyard, its central beat.

To expand on that thought, now the SCMP has created two new products, both digital: Abacus and Inkston.

If you concocted news sites in a lab for maximum hipness, high polish, and most evocative noun names, you’d get Abacus and Inkstone.

These separate verticals — new offshoots of the Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post, the storied English-language newspaper covering China, based in Hong Kong — are highly designed, efficiently product-managed, and precisely targeted at the types of topics meticulous consumer surveys have determined are what news readers want more coverage on, but which few existing news sites cover satisfactorily.

Abacus covers tech in China broadly, and Inkstone is a daily digest on Chinese life and politics, with an eye towards explaining China for people who might just be glancingly interested in the country or newly aware of its influence in global politics. A third site, name undisclosed and launching sometime in June, will focus on food and travel.

These new verticals will be workhorses in trying to fulfill SCMP’s goal of becoming a news organization not only for the China-interested, but also for the “globally curious.”

Global ambitions

It ‘s no secret that the SCMP publishers have big global ambitions. The Hong Kong-based newspaper editors always told me that “nobody covers China like we do. It’s our beat. It’s what we do best.” When I was redesigning the SCMP in 2016, you could already tell that global ambitions thoughts would float around our meetings.

Now, the SCMP management, somewhat changed since the days when I was a consultant there, sees potential audience growth with the two new products just launched.

Abacus — which has already undergone a few design changes in a few months — covers Chinese tech and will build up an extensive gadget reviews section. The focus is solely on China, giving Abacus an edge with a global audience that has particular audience in what continues to be a major world economic power.

Inkstone deals with China llife, currently posting about six new stories per day around half of which build on existing SCMP reporting. Interesting features of inkstone: there’s a countdown to the next daily brief and a meter that tells readers how many of the six stories they’ve completed. It includes many videos, and a daily newsletter.

Both are free at the moment. But there is potential for ad placement .