The issue has 8 sections: Cover Story, 20th IBLAC, Macro Economy & Finance, Real Estate, Auto & Air, Metal & Energy, CIIF and Technology, which have been re-typeset in the magazine.

Our e-magazine is specifically designed for business readers and is mainly based on issues discussed in the Business Insight pages of Shanghai Daily.

Officially launched in January 2007, the magazine is published every month and is free to download during its trial.

You can download the magazine via PDF files from our Website (). or you can subscribe to our Insight Newsletter by typing in your e-mail address in the box at the bottom of the front page. The readers on this list will be e-mailed when a new version of the magazine is published.

Shanghai Daily's "Best Story" and "Best Page" Awards for October were announced yesterday.

The Best Story of the month went to Lifestyle writer Yang Di's “bedroom+living room+kitchen+bathroom = 49㎡ Tiny bachelor pad fits the bill” on the Home/Design page of Shanghai Daily Sunday, which was published on October 26. Yang found the sources on her own and compiled the whole package of home-deco stories and pictures on time every two weeks, which earned high remarks from our deputy editor-in-chief Wu Zheng.

“It's hard to define the peculiar and outstanding designs and details from a flat or house. But Yang provides impressive angles in her stories,” said deputy editor-in-chief Zhu Huanian.

The Best Page Layout went to Li Xiaoying for her D4-5 effort on October 17. The two pages were about the newly-announced sister cities of Hangzhou including Fukui in Japan and Cape Town in South Africa. Li designed a colorful layout by illustrating each city with a pattern from the first letter of its name.

The Best Photo went to Zhang Suoqing's “Sealed with a kiss.” The photographer captured the sweet moment of five couples in different poses, which impressed the jury panel.

The Best Online Story went to Yang Lifei's “Taxi firm chases up missing fare.” She added more background information through online research compared to its counterpart Chinese story.

Users of ShanghaiDaily.com may have noticed in the previous month frequent repairs which hampered some of the Website's functions, especially the advanced search and PDF downloads. We are glad to announce that you will no longer encounter such situations again in the near future, as a major optimization process has been completed.

Since the launch of the current version of ShanghaiDaily.com, the news data on our server has increased by such a stunning rate that up to now a total of 245,000 articles have been stored in a single data table. The PDF files are mounting up at an even greater rate at 200 megabytes per day.

This storage issue considerably slowed the Website's accessing speed during the last year, causing endless complaints from users and our editors. The "404 not found error" which frequently occurred on the home page during the last few weeks, resulting in an incomplete display of the page, was also indirectly caused by the cumbersome data table.

Thus, optimizing the Website's performance has been a top priority for our in-house engineers and technical support company in the last few weeks. They split the current data table into two. One is smaller and faster. It records the ongoing data of the current year. The other is large, but accessed far less frequently. It is for the historical data of previous years. PDF file storage has been similarly changed. These changes have enhanced the efficiency of the systems but at the same time won't change users' experience compared with previous settings. 

It was also found that some small applications in the right panel of the home page, such as a calendar for the What's On section, had further obstructed the loading of the page due to some complicated scripts. For this reason, these applications were either removed or considerably altered.

The optimization has proved successful as no previous problems have occurred again since its completion last week. To prevent ShanghaiDaily.com from running into similar problems in the future, our team will regularly carry out maintenance operations, including moving archive data into the historical table and slimming complicated scripts, from time to time. Thank you for your support to our work.

ShanghaiDaily.com is performing a database optimizing operation. During this period, search results will only contain articles published after January 1, 2008 if you search through the full text of our articles. Try search by "Title contains" or "Author" instead.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and are trying our best to make all of our archives available through the full-text search function as soon as possible.

Thank you for you patience.

Yesterday marked the Shanghai news circle's celebration of China's ninth Journalists' Day. The city's outstanding journalists gathered at a Shanghai Media Group studio to review their accomplishments.

Awards were given to journalists whose work represented a strong sense of social responsibility, especially among coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and Paralympics and the Sichuan earthquake earlier this year.

Shanghai Daily's deputy editor-in-chief Zhu Huanian was awarded the individual prize for her outstanding performance in covering the Beijing Olympics. Shanghai Daily's Olympic reports focused on the themes of environmentalism, humanism and technology, capturing the spirit of the Games.

Our deputy editor-in-chief Wu Zheng and layout designer Chen Jie were awarded third prize in the 18th China News Awards for their excellent work in covering the 2007 Shanghai Special Olympics.  

Shanghai Daily will continue providing vivid stories that cross cultural barriers.

Editor's Note: Shanghai Daily reporter Rachel Yan is on a training session at the Journalism School of the University of Missouri. She worked as an election volunteer at the university and sent us back some photographs and stories of how the voting panned out. We would like to share her story here.


Goodies and fliers at the election party, with CNN tuned on

Election Day Snapshots
— 12pm: High Traffic
by Rachel Yan @ Memorial Union, November 4th, 2008

It is a cheerfully sunny afternoon.

Memorial Union of the University of Missouri is one of the five central polling places in Boone County. Any Boone-registered voter can cast their ballot here.

"It's to make things more convenient for students," one of the voting supervisors named Larry said, adding that many students spend the day in class on campus and therefore have no time to vote at their designated polling places.

Lunch time proved to be the peak hour for voting on campus. Students carrying textbooks and schoolbags packed the student union's lounge as they waited to vote.

But the line moved slower than people expected, as more than half of the young voters chose to fill out a paper ballot rather than an electronic one.


Missouri  voter's instructions

"Paper ballots are still more popular with people here," Larry said, adding that some states outside Missouri had canceled paper ballots in favor of electronic ones.

"For many people here, paper ones are more reliable because they are tangible and people can see their own choices marked and scanned in the system," he continued.

Each polling place was equipped with only one scanner machine near the exit. That dragged the whole waiting and voting procedure to about 30 minutes per person at peak hours, voting supervisors said.

On a table near the exit, sticker tags of "I voted" were randomly scattered around. Only a few students picked up a sticker on the way out even though it entitled you to a free slice of pizza.

On the upper floor of the Union's south tower there was an election party.

Live CNN election coverage was on a big projector screen and registered voters were entered in a draw to win a free iPod.

"All these are little tricks to encourage students to vote," said Jenny Wade, president of the university's student union program, the election party organizer.


The I voted tag

"It's the first time for us to hold such an election party. We know that there are lots of events going on, but let's see how the food and iPod attraction works," she said.

Editor's note: Rachel Yan is a Shanghai Daily reporter in the Metro department. She is currently on an exchange program at the University of Missouri in the United States. In the following story, she tells how her quiet Saturday afternoon turned into her witnessing how canvassing for votes is done in the US presidential election.

Rachel Yan and her volunteer partner, Mary Catherine, at the Obama campaign office site at Columbia, Missouri.

Look who's knocking at your door
By Rachel Yan
November 1, 2008

It never occurred to me that I would end up canvassing for US Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama on Saturday afternoon.
When I left my dorm at noon, I was meant to see some friends off at a bus station. Seven of nine fellow visiting scholars in the same program as me were heading to Chicago to witness the likely celebration at Senator Obama's election campaign headquarters on November 4.
And here I was, stuck in the small town of Columbia at the Missouri School of Journalism, which is fully geared up for its first-ever large-scale and tech-savvy Webcast coverage of the election.

How it happened
I was walking home and taking some pictures when I saw people in front of a door filling out forms. As I got closer, I realized it was a temporary office for Obama's election campaign.

I was quite curious about what was going on inside and what these people of different gender, age and ethnic background were busy doing. While I was trying to peek inside, a knowledgeable-looking woman with gray hair, gold-frame glasses and a blue T-shirt with a big "November 4" sign on the back looked at me and smiled.

"Hi, what are you guys doing here?" I asked.

"We are volunteers for the Obama Campaign, and we are about to do some canvassing today," she replied. "Are you interested in joining us?"

Read More...