Alibaba Group Launches Alizila, a Corporate News Website Covering Alibaba.com, Taobao and the International E-commerce Industry

Alizila, the A-to-Z of Alibaba, to Provide Readers with News They Can Use about New Products, Services and Developments

HANGZHOU, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--To address the growing need for information about the fast-moving e-commerce industry, Alibaba Group has launched Alizila, a web-based news organization to provide Alibaba users with a source of timely, trustworthy stories, videos and information about Alibaba Group products and services as well as international online trade.

“Our hope is that our target audience—customers, industry analysts, and other journalists—will come to see us as a credible, useful news source.”

Alizila (www.alizila.com) is designed to help fill a void in business coverage. Challenging economic conditions and reader migration to the web have caused the death of scores of magazines and newspapers and the loss of jobs of thousands of journalists. As a result, there are fewer business reporters to cover Alibaba.com (HKSE: 1688, 1688.HK), the world's largest B2B marketplace, and Taobao, China's largest online retailing platform.

Instead of being another marketing-driven corporate website, Alizila is a quasi-independent news outlet. Alizila is edited by Jim Erickson, a longtime journalist and former senior editor for business and technology for TIME magazine's Asia edition.

"Our intent is to provide coverage of developments at Alibaba that otherwise might go uncovered, and to do so with traditional journalistic rigor and skepticism," said Erickson. "Our hope is that our target audience—customers, industry analysts, and other journalists—will come to see us as a credible, useful news source."

John Spelich, Alibaba Group Vice President for International Corporate Affairs, called Alizila an experiment in a new way for corporations to use the Internet.

"In terms of how businesses are reacting to the radical transition taking place in the media, we think Alizila is a potential game-changer for our customers. As a result of the downturn, our users have fewer places to turn for news and commentary about us. We felt that it was important to see this kind of coverage continue, so we decided to build it ourselves,” said Spelich.

The website, which has been operating in beta since its soft launch on July 25, formally debuts on the eve of Alibaba Group's annual summit for e-commerce entrepreneurs, known as AliFest, taking place September 10 and 11 in Hangzhou, China. Alizila will provide full coverage of the event, including videos, blogs and stories. Featured speakers at AliFest 2010 include California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma.