Veteran commmentator slams Chinese media's meaningless "transformation"

The current journalism professor says the Chinese media should only return to their content.

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 a two-decade-long in-house commentator of the influential China Youth Daily, having won the state-run China Journalism Award eight times and 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 October 19.

无意义的精益求精，转型失败媒体的通病

Meaningless Perfectionsim—the Common Ailment of Failed Media Transformations

Abstract: Traditional media outlets have gone through too many rounds of transformation and integration, exhausting themselves with endless new forms and overly grand buzzwords. What they truly need is to return to the most fundamental, most essential, and most deep-rooted question of all: how to attract users through high-quality content.

If the transformation of Chinese media outlets proceeds without genuine, high-quality content—without real depth and substance—and instead drifts into conceptual games of “inventing big and new words,” superficial digital integration, and Great Leap Forward–style vanity metrics and inflated traffic, the road ahead will only grow harder.

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Have the transformation and integration of traditional media worked, and have they delivered on their expected goals? That remains a weighty question. Even before examining the data, the everyday “felt presence” of media content points to a pessimistic answer.

Media organizations should ask themselves: when outlets boast of “billions of views across the internet,” how many people actually watch? Of the countless reports they push, how many truly address the public’s real concerns, and how many pursue in-depth questioning of critical issues? Amid the torrent from media matrices, apps, and all-media platforms, how many pieces can claim with confidence to meet users’ indispensable needs?

If media transformation proceeds without genuine, high-quality content—without real depth and substance—and instead drifts into conceptual games of “inventing big and new words,” superficial digital integration, and Great Leap Forward–style vanity metrics and inflated traffic, the road ahead will only grow harder.

Traffic numbers can be exaggerated at will—say hundreds of millions, and no one bothers to check. Yet this “on-paper traffic,” cooked up for internal reports, earns neither market recognition nor user approval, let alone real monetization. Influence and revenue are hard metrics; they cannot be faked. Running a media outlet demands enormous daily costs; if the traffic is faked, the integration hollow, and the transformation superficial, the figures are nothing but inflated bubbles. The bill for maintaining the “facade” of transformation and the “framework” of integration keeps rising, while the actual returns and the impact of content keep shrinking. That widening gap will, inevitably, explode one day. In recent years, media transformation and integration have achieved much, but several common underlying problems should not be ignored.

From my long-term observation, the media outlets that have failed in their transformation share several common problems:

First, many outlets have abandoned the core content that once earned them influence. They have forfeited their advantage, chasing users who never belonged to them in arenas they are not good at, and competing for traffic that cannot be monetized on their own weakest ground. What exactly does “transformation” mean, and where is it heading? A successful transformation does not require becoming unrecognizable; it requires transforming around one’s core assets.

And what are a media outlet’s core assets? Exclusive news, in-depth reporting, distinctive commentary, scrutiny of power, authoritative interpretation, profound ideas, classic visuals, and quick response—indispensable user needs and the foundation that makes a media brand irreplaceable, indispensable, and enduring. When strategy decks invoke “Internet+,” “new channels+,” or “new technologies+,” the subject must be explicit—the outlet’s strongest core content. That is the content audiences will pay for, spend time with, recommend to friends and family, and follow over the long run.

I have always believed that for any industry to survive in the long run, it must possess a certain power of substitution—an indispensable function. Law substitutes for rights: when legal trouble hits, legal professionals defend those rights. Medicine substitutes for the body and life: when the body fails, doctors are the recourse. Literature substitutes for speech, giving voice and imagery to what everyday language cannot express. Philosophy substitutes for thought, guiding reflection on the soul’s hardest questions.

What, then, are media and journalism? They should substitute for perception, acting as intermediaries with the authority to report and edit, helping people obtain information essential to their lives. Media should extend human senses—eyes, ears, and voice—satisfy people’s curiosity about the new, and interrogate truth and falsehood on the public’s behalf.

Substitution implies irreplaceability; that is the true core of media content. By that measure, how many outlets today still produce indispensable, substantive news that users cannot find elsewhere?

Second, the meaningless perfectionism. Traditional media has a culture of rigor, having developed over time layered editorial gatekeeping designed to professionalism and the authority of print. But when the content is hollow—no flagship pieces, only trivial, fragmented stories—that rigor collapses into meaningless perfectionism. Polishing low-value pieces into “exquisite craftsmanship” only heightens the sense of meaninglessness when they carry little news value and attract almost no readers. The result is internal exhaustion. Reporters and editors feel increasingly drained: rigid reviews, endless line edits, multiple revision rounds, nights lost to layout—yet the final copy still lacks the confidence to earn a click. Without high-quality content, procedural, performative “perfection” is simply a waste of people’s lives.

Third, complicating the simple. Many outlets keep stacking layers upon layers of complexity, launching new “concepts” every few months, yet lack the discipline to keep simple problems simple. This is a widespread issue in media transformation and integration: grand terms, abstract theories, and dense jargon that project “abstract busyness,” make the outlet look industrious, and still fail to produce content audiences actually want to see. I remember one outlet’s splashy integration-and-transformation plan drew a pointed reply in the comment section: “You can barely afford to pay salaries, yet you’re still throwing around big words? Your problem is too many buzzwords and too little real news.” Another outlet opted for subtraction, shuttering several apps to correct a habit of overcomplicating simple problems.

Media outlets lose readers not for lack of technology, buzzwords, or distribution channels, but for lack of high-quality content that audiences truly want to follow. Until this simple and fundamental issue is fixed, each time a new platform or technology emerges, media outlets will rush to follow the trend: expanding their presence everywhere and building so-called “all-media matrices” that keep staff exhausted and audiences shrinking. As Professor Du Junfei noted, after years of talking about “omnimedia,” “integrated media,” and “intelligent media,” and despite all the effort invested, the fundamental question—what it means to be real media—remains unresolved. If the media cannot report authentic news, then omnimedia, integrated media, and intelligent media are not real media at all. Endless, repetitive, perfunctory “research” on the same issues has driven many media outlets into severe fatigue.

Fourth, video over text and the blind worship of video. As I discussed in my earlier article “The Consequences of the Decline of Professional News Practice Are Now Becoming Apparent,” many media outlets have fallen into the trap of low-level transition to video turn under the banner of “media integration.” Stories that could be told cleanly in prose are refashioned into videos that devour time and manpower and draw few viewers. The so-called “all-staff video transformation” has become an internal, self-consuming vanity project that drains effort, energy, and morale inside newsrooms.

Video presentation, in fact, delivers extremely poor cost-effectiveness. It burns through staff hours, cash, platform resources, and users’ time. Only a tiny fraction win the “unparalleled fortune” of mass sharing; most traffic evaporates quickly and resist monetization. Sidelining traditional writing and self-sabotaging their craft, news outlets churn out videos that only create illusions of reach, exhausting their teams and diverting resources from the their legacy advantages.

Fifth, low-level imitation and duplication, a lack of in-depth originality, and no energy left to cultivate traditional strongholds. Many outlets have stretched across too many channels, propping up “platforms” they cannot sustain with their own reporting. They sow on others’ platforms while letting their own fields lie fallow. With so many fronts to maintain, what fills the space? Content is finite. What remains is imitation and copying—padding, recycling, and rehashing the same few stories—driving severe homogenization and declining quality. When a new event breaks, countless outlets pile in; yet the output is near-identical, with no exclusive investigation of their own. In the end, it is indistinguishable from reposting.

Sixth, abandoning professional standards in favor of platform standards. Looking at the content of today’s major news apps, it is clear that much of the so-called “media integration and transformation” simply follows the metrics set by a few big tech companies and platforms: clicks on WeChat blogs, trending searches on social media, traffic on Douyin [Chinese equivalent of TikTok], and view counts on the Toutiao [popular Chinese news aggregator]. A friend once remarked that we should beware of those “easily measurable metrics.” People adopt them as primary standards not because they truly matter, but because they are the easiest to see. In their transformation, many media outlets may have lost what matters most: their own professional standards—the editorial judgment to evaluate good content and the long-term benchmarks that earn user recognition and loyalty.

Seventh, public-opinion phobia, timidity in innovation and leadership, and a passive, blame-averse way of working. Media should be staffed by society’s most forward-leaning, energetic, and bold innovators who use reporting to catalyse social progress, commentary to raise public understanding, and information to broaden the public’s horizons. This process inevitably enters a society’s “zone of legitimate controversy,” inviting questions and debate. Yet many outlets have developed a deep “public-opinion phobia,” fearing coverage that could spark controversy or debate. They crave the trending list but dread the possible contention it brings. This obsession with public opinion control has turned the media into a conservative force. Journalism is meant to expand influence, yet under the dominance of this mentality, media outlets voluntarily relinquish that influence. Risk avoidance becomes the prime directive: impact and originality are dispensable so long as no “public-opinion incident” occurs. With time, this defensive crouch hardens into instinct.

Eighth, a hollow “user orientation”—media outlets neither care whether users like them nor realize they are losing users in the course of transformation. A deep crisis that media outlets fail to see is: users rarely identify as “readers of certain outlet” anymore; they call themselves “Douyin users,” “Weibo users,” “Xiaohongshu users,” or “Bilibili users.” Users lack an identity bond with media, likely because they have long failed to connect with the content. Media transformation has multiplied formats and inflated titles. At press conferences, reporters recite credentials so long the host chuckles—“I’m an all-media reporter from X TV, Y website, and Z app.” But can that mile-long title be matched by work that sticks—work that makes someone say, “I’m a certain outlet user”?

In recent years, some traditional media outlets have gone through too many rounds of transformation and integration, exhausting themselves with endless new forms and overly grand buzzwords. What they truly need is to return to the most fundamental, most essential, and most deep-rooted question of all: how to attract users through high-quality content.