November 8 is China’s state-anoited Journalists’ Day. Here is a reflection by an industry veteran who won the state-run China Journalism Award eight times in his two-decade career.

Cao Lin is now a professor at the Journalism and Information Communication School of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. Before returning to his alma mater, Cao was an in-house commentator of the influential China Youth Daily, later taking the helm of the newspaper’s commentary section.

A prolific opinion maker, he continues to write his 吐槽青年博士 blog within WeChat. He published the following commentary on November 8, 2025.

少说假大空，用硬新闻去提高社会能见度

Say Fewer Empty Words; Use Hard News to Improve Society’s Visibility

Journalists’ Day always compels a few words. I’ve seen a lot of chicken-soup posts gilding journalism, the reporter profession, and the media industry—some are self-moved, some overly exalted and sentimental—and it’s uncomfortable. The crisis faced today by the journalism major, the profession, and the media industry is visible to the naked eye. Journalism as an academic major is being talked down. Traditional media has fallen into a kind of “stagflation”: content looks more and more abundant, convergence forms are all flashy—videos, metaverse—information is getting inflated, reporters are getting more exhausted, incomes are falling, and the influence of media news content is declining. In many public incidents, people rely even more on personalized sources than on mainstream media. In this crisis of journalism, sentimentality is shameful, self-moved self-consolation is pathetic and contemptible.

Last year, I attended a professional seminar somewhere. Inside the seminar, media people were still talking about traffic—tens of millions, billions, viral hits, screens covered, how many shares, and so on. During a break I went to the restroom and overheard two colleagues from newspapers chatting. One asked: “Does your newspaper still publish?” The other sighed: “Ah, whether we publish or not—what’s the difference?” That restroom dialogue shocked me. First, colleagues don’t even know whether the other person’s newspaper still exists. Second, “what’s the difference?”—a powerless self-mockery born of a lack of confidence in one’s own content. That restroom exchange was real and cruel. Newspaper people must strengthen themselves.

In a discourse where journalism is universally talked down, I still insist: doing media and doing news requires working hard, through high-quality content, to rebuild confidence. Whether a newspaper exists or not makes a huge difference. Whether news exists or not makes a huge difference.

On Journalists’ Day, ...