Amid media crackdown at home, Chinese news outlet looks abroad

SHANGHAI — The Paper is a new media success story in a fast-changing marketplace for news. It covers contentious issues — such as official corruption and a recent scandal involving improperly stored vaccines — with a clutch of digital bells and whistles. Its smartphone app, it says, has been downloaded about 10 million times.

But The Paper is different from BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital voices that have risen up to challenge traditional media: It is overseen by the Chinese Communist Party, prospering at a time when China’s leaders are increasingly restricting what their people read and watch.

Now The Paper’s owner has set its sights elsewhere. This week, it is set to introduce an English-language version called Sixth Tone in hopes of making its recipe for success in China work abroad. Some government pressure is inescapable, says Mr Wei Xing, its editor, and the former deputy editor-in-chief of The Paper. “There are two paths you can choose,” he said. One is to simply complain, he said, but “we want to be part of the conversation, both global and domestic”.

It is a complicated time for China’s news media. Appetite at home is voracious: Nearly 555 million Chinese people use online news portals, according to a Chinese government-backed Internet agency, a jump of more than half since 2010. China has also encouraged its news outlets to go abroad. President Xi Jinping has urged the Chinese media to “tell the China story well”.

But those trends face China’s increasingly tough media crackdown. The authorities have tightened limits on who can disseminate information in China, tamped down on reports about its environmental and economic problems, and restricted what its people see online.

“There’s this very modern infrastructure, all these apps and very modernised packages that they’re disseminating, and it’s like a beautiful, beautiful house where the electrical wiring is missing,” said Mr Kerry Brown, the director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. “You’re not going to be able to say things about the party that are really critical.”

Already, many other Chinese media outlets just parrot the party’s stilted language. (One recent sample: “Chinese vice-premier expects steady, healthy growth”.) Then there are the examples of a tin ear, such as when the English website of the People’s Daily newspaper reposted an article from The Onion, the satirical website, that declared North Korea’s Kim Jong-un the sexiest man alive.

Mr Wei argues that Sixth Tone will have an easier time. While all Chinese media outlets are to some degree state-controlled, it lacks a politics-saturated bureaucracy because it is a start-up, he says. In traditional English-language Chinese media, “some reports could appear because of government promotion. I don’t think we have this so-called task. We just tell the stories with a more human factor,” says Mr Wei.

Still, Mr Wei recognises the limits. “Maybe sometimes when reports are published there may be some comments from certain government departments,” he says. Asked for examples at The Paper, he says, “for me, it’s difficult to specify one case”.

The Paper generally appeals to China’s educated and its millennials, known as the “post-90s” generation in China. “It’s one of the few news organisations here that still have some original, quality content,” says Mr Feng Jingya, 24, a financial analyst in Beijing and a reader of The Paper. “I feel like many newspapers or news portals just copy each other.”

Mr Feng singled out The Paper’s recent coverage of the sale of improperly stored vaccines, a scandal that has called into question the ability of the Chinese authorities to regulate healthcare. “I bet not many news organisations here are willing to spend time doing the firsthand reporting or have the guts to break this kind of news first,” says Mr Feng.

The Paper has long presented itself as different from China’s stuffy media. Eager to embrace a zippy start-up culture sweeping China, editors ordered the internal walls of an old newspaper office torn down when they introduced the all-digital site in 2014, so journalists could communicate more easily. “Traditional Chinese media has small offices with walls,” says Mr Wei.

It made its name with stories about corruption, including a detailed series — with interactive graphics — about Ling Jihua, a former top aide to former president Hu Jintao who was arrested and accused of corruption, adultery and improperly hoarding party and state secrets.

The lead story on Sixth Tone’s pre-debut home page, “Waking Up to the Threat of Domestic Violence”, mirrors The Paper’s emphasis on legal reporting. On March 1, China passed its first law against family violence.

In addition to 22 Chinese and eight non-Chinese staff, Sixth Tone will use the resources of The Paper, which include a network of about 400 text and multimedia journalists — and a drone. “We are all digital. We are born to be digital. We want to do data journalism, video journalism, graphics, multimedia reports, panorama videos, virtual reality,” says Mr Wei.

Shanghai United Media Group, which is overseen by the city’s Communist Party Committee, owns a clutch of Chinese media outlets. The group is initially investing 30 million yuan (S$6.27 million) in Sixth Tone, which plans to make money from advertising, says Mr Wei.

Mr Wei hopes the website’s name reflects how they want to meet it: Mandarin Chinese has five tones, including a lesser-known fifth, “no-tone” tone. “We want to be the sixth one. We want to be fresh and different,” he says. THE NEW YORK TIMES