The Vanishing Craft of Journalism in China

The following article, from a year and a half ago, completes my recent rant on legacy media and journalism in China.

Now a journalism professor in Wuhan at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Cao Lin previously served for over twenty years at China Youth Daily, earning eight China Journalism Awards and heading its commentary desk. In the critique published on June 14, 2024, he contends that the industry’s fixation on “integration,” video-ization, and eye-popping traffic has eroded professionalism: reporters stay at their desks, copy-paste replaces shoe-leather, headlines chase emotion over accuracy, and writing grows padded and imprecise. - Zichen

“新闻业务”退化的恶果正集中涌现

Cao Lin: The Consequences of the Decline of “Professional Journalism” Are Now Fully Emerging

Recently, an article titled 《警惕，“新闻业务”呈严重退化趋势》“Beware: A Serious Decline in ‘Professional Journalism’” went viral within media circles. The article itself contained little that was new, yet its title struck at the heart of today’s media reality: in some organizations, the pursuit of “media integration” is in full swing, new technical buzzwords are coined one after another, while the most fundamental craft of all—“professional journalism”—has fallen into serious decline!

Consider one seemingly small example: a media outlet recently pushed a trending topic titled “必须割掉危害孩子这颗全民网红毒瘤 Must cut off this harm-children national internet-celeb tumor.” What kind of headline is that? It makes no sense, no matter how you read it—cut off whom, exactly? What does “national internet-celeb tumor” even mean? And how can “harm-children”—a verb–object construction—serve as a premodifier of “tumor”? Many commenters mocked it in the replies: “Who taught you Chinese? Even AI wouldn’t write a sentence this bad.”

Indeed, the problem runs deep. The accompanying commentary was no better: it jumped to sweeping denunciation of “national” internet celebrities—on what basis? If the influencers are alleged to harm children, where is the logic, the evidence, the serious investigations or academic studies? Yesterday, the media celebrated the “influencer economy”; today, the same media cast the phenomenon as a “social scourge.” This sickly trending topic is a microcosm of the severe decline in “professional journalism.”

Professional journalism is the fundamental skill set and core competence of journalists, the foundation of the media, and the basic logic of journalism itself. At the most basic level, it requires reporters to go into the field, reconstruct the facts faithfully in writing, respect truth, ensure that every element of a news story is complete, write with clarity and brevity, and preserve that