Meet China's One-Person Indie Outlet: New News CN

Beyond the desperation of China's tightening press environment, a solo journalist strives to become a rare, independent voice for the country's digital generation.

When New News CN announced its launch on February 21, 2024, its founding statement included language that, inside China’s firewall, would have guaranteed swift deletion — “authoritarian silencing” (威權噤聲) and “press freedom” (新聞自由). It spoke openly of the desperation generated by China’s tightening media controls.

In conversation with CMP’s Tian Jian, the outlet’s founder puts it more bluntly: “Anyone who truly does good journalism inside China is depressed — every single one of them.”

Since that time, the independent media outlet — which has accounts on Instagram and Matters — has persisted as one journalist’s effort to move beyond the despair of China’s sealed media space, hoping to find escape and possibly even change. Last year, the outlet collaborated with Singapore-based Initium Media for a report called “From Blocking the Scene to Relying on Official Bulletins: How Every Link in the Chain of Journalism Has Been Dismantled in China,” which documented the concrete reasons why journalism in China today inspires such despair. The report’s final section looked at how the current generation of Chinese journalists are endeavoring to circumvent systemic restrictions. The section, referencing the idiom popularized by Deng Xiaoping, was called “Feeling for Stones to Cross the River — or Becoming One of Those Stones.”

New News CN is one of those stones.

In this interview, New News CN talks about building a one-person newsroom, defending journalistic principles, navigating backlash, and sustaining independent Chinese-language media in an era of censorship and exile.

Tian Jian: Why did you want to start a one-person media outlet, and why name it New News CN?

New News CN (hereafter XN): The reason it’s called New News CN is that I wanted to create something new and different. Over the past seven or eight years, many Chinese journalists have left institutional media — because of censorship, but also because salaries are so low. The overall media environment in China has grown increasingly grim. For various reasons, some people have left China, and many others have changed careers. Some are no longer working in journalism full-time, but continue writing on and off as freelancers.

I tried that too. But I found that because I was still writing about topics the Chinese authorities don’t permit, I had to operate in an extremely secretive state — no byline of my own, no portfolio of my own, and certainly no way to build my own reputation. That created a Gordian Knot for me in terms of realizing my own sense of self-worth. I wanted to break out of that pattern.

Very small-scale independent media exist all over the world. After Hong Kong’s Apple Daily and Stand News were shut down, many journalists started small independent outlets of their own. You see this in Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. That’s what inspired me.

Of course, with so few people, a one-person operation can never function like Initium Media — but that’s fine. Everyone does what they can with what they have. This way, the reporting I produce belongs to me. That sense of ownership is something many independent journalists today simply cannot have.

Low-wage special report co-produced by New News CN and Diyin. SOURCE: Diyin website.

Tian Jian: New News CN has covered many different topics. Given limited time and resources, how do you choose what to report on?

XN: Before I launched the account, I spent nearly two months thinking about it every day — sketching out in a small notebook what kinds of stories this outlet should cover.

For topics that Western media cover constantly, like China’s foreign policy, military affairs and geopolitics, I decided not to compete in those areas. There are also plenty of topics that Chinese media can still cover, so I don’t need to pile on there either. The main goal was differentiation.

Take the “Back Wages in China” (欠薪中國) series I did in early 2025 — that’s a topic Chinese media would normally cover, but it’s clearly something domestic outlets can’t actually report on, and it’s not something foreign media pays particular attention to either. I’ve also done more accessible topics, like viewing China’s censorship system through the DeepSeek AI model.

That said, some topics are important enough that I’ll follow them anyway. The sentencing in the Huang Xueqin case, for instance. Western media will definitely cover it, and other Chinese independent outlets will too, but I covered it because I thought it mattered. And I can dig deeper than others, or maybe move faster. Even on topics shared [across various media], you can find a way to do something different.

I also consider topics I personally care about. Human rights reporting and protest coverage feel essential to me — and increasingly rare. The people who used to do that work are either in prison or unable to continue for various reasons. I feel a responsibility to carry that lineage forward. It’s something I’ll keep doing.

I also want to pursue some diversity. On gender coverage, for example. That issue has inspired a lot of young Chinese journalists and connects deeply with their personal experiences growing up.

Tian Jian: Unlike Western media, Chinese-language outlets typically don’t make their editorial guidelines public. But New News CN has published detailed editorial principles. What motivated that decision? The principles also state that you don’t allow sources to review articles or quoted content before publication. How has that worked in practice?

XN: I drew on the practices of Western media. Reuters, for example, has a link at the bottom of every article leading to its editorial standards. The version for the public is somewhat broad, and the internal handbook for staff is certainly more detailed. But I think it’s enough for a principled exchange with the public. The New York Times website also makes this available, and each journalist’s profile page mentions how they uphold those ethical standards.

Western media does this because of a global trend: people are increasingly distrustful of news organizations, especially establishment ones. The context differs from country to country, but in China’s case it stems from two things. On the one hand, there is official manipulation. On the other, there is the rise of populism fueled by social media.

So what do you do? You spend enormous effort writing a 10,000-word investigation, and someone dismisses it as fake news without reading it. All that work for nothing. So wherever explanation is needed, I explain. I think that’s how you earn credibility. For instance, any time a source appears anonymously in my reporting, I always note that it’s anonymous and explain why.

Pre-publication review is something I deeply despise. When I was interning at a Chinese media outlet, many interview subjects asked to review the article beforehand. I can’t remember whether I ended up showing them in the end, but every time someone raised it, I bristled. I felt it was disrespectful to the independence of journalism, to the craft itself — treating the outlet like a PR machine or a propaganda vehicle.

Why spell it out in writing? There’s a practical reason. Even sources who share my values — human rights workers, lawyers — sometimes ask to see the article before publication, even if they’re activists living overseas. I think people in that same sphere should be especially willing to be open and direct with each other, which is why I posted the editorial principles publicly.

One month after publishing a report on Zhang Yadi, New News CN published a statement about its decision to run the report, which drew some criticism. SOURCE: New News CN Instagram.

It’s happened more than once that a like-minded source asks whether they can take a look before it runs. I’ll send them the link to the editorial principles and explain: I’m an independent outlet. In civil society, everyone occupies a different role. I hope you can understand and respect my work. In the end, most people do.

So I can say with confidence that of all the pieces New News CN has published, not a single one has been shown to any source before publication. Just because you won’t let me show you the article doesn’t mean I can’t write the story. Principles have to be upheld.

Tian Jian: Your editorial principles also mention “objective verification”(客觀核查) and “fairness and impartiality” (公正公平). Media today are frequently criticized for not being “neutral” enough. How do you understand and act on these principles?

XN: In my environment — including the journalism education I received and my work experience — nobody treated “neutrality” as a guiding principle. The only context in which I’ve encountered “neutrality” is in relation to partisanship. That is, not being aligned with any particular political party or faction. It’s not a broader concept than that.

But on many issues, neutrality is simply not possible. Insisting on it can make you complicit in wrongdoing.

What journalists should strive for is “objectivity” and “balance.” On objectivity: whatever the facts are, that’s what should be presented. But everyone has their limitations, their own feelings, perceptions, and attitudes. And most of what New News CN publishes isn’t hard news. It’s issue-driven exploration. Even if a topic has purely objective qualities, the moment it passes through human understanding, subjectivity inevitably enters. I can’t avoid that. I can only try, through professional skill, to minimize the influence of my own subjective views on how objective facts are presented.

New News CN collaborated with Initium Media to report on the current challenges facing Chinese media. SOURCE: New News CN Instagram.

As for balance: it doesn’t mean that if, for example, Zhang San and Wang Er are in a dispute, I give one sentence to each. That’s just lazy, false balance. True balance means that if one side is vulnerable, is being oppressed, then you should present its situation from multiple angles and illuminate the structural forces behind it.

That said, even readers who share my values may sometimes take issue with how I’ve described certain facts. In those moments, I return to a very basic question: who did I create this outlet for? Who am I writing these stories for? If you’re going to run your own media, you have to be clear about who you’re serving. The readers New News CN serves are mostly Chinese-language readers who, like me, pursue the spirit of freedom — the majority of them Chinese.

So when someone says I’m not being objective, like a nationalist troll, say, or an online critic, my instinct is to ask: after this piece goes out, will it be accepted by the community I’m trying to serve? If they accept it, then I’m fine. That’s a kind of floor, in a way. It keeps me from tearing myself apart, from falling into a kind of philosophical self-negation.

Tian Jian: New News CN‘s main platform is Instagram. Why Instagram, and who are your readers?

XN: In open societies, people have free access to information. But China is not an open society. That’s why I chose to operate on Instagram. Someone inside China who is also on Instagram is, in a sense, already equivalent to a Chinese person living abroad. These are people who may have studied overseas at some point, or who actively use VPNs and seek out different sources of information. That’s the audience New News CN is aimed at — some inside China, some abroad, but with the same mindset.

Many veteran journalists still care primarily about writing a good article and don’t pay much attention to audience research or audience engagement — or simply don’t have that awareness. I had it from the start. I regularly track reader statistics. Instagram’s backend has the data built right in; I pull it together, make a table, and review it myself.

By IP address, nearly 40 percent of New News CN‘s readers are from mainland China — people physically located there.

What surprised me was how many readers come from Hong Kong — close to 30 percent. I suspect it’s because Hong Kong readers are more accustomed to independent and small-scale media, having lived through the 2019 anti-extradition movement and the 2020 National Security Law, when people began getting used to this kind of outlet. There are also many Hong Kongers living on the mainland. And from what I can tell, local Hong Kong readers follow developments in mainland China more closely than Taiwan’s society generally does.

Mainland China and Hong Kong together account for nearly 70 percent of my readers. Taiwan is a little over 10 percent. The remaining 20 percent comes from Europe and the United States. I believe they are mostly international students now living there, mainly Chinese, with some from Hong Kong and Taiwan as well.

As for age, I can say I genuinely have a lot of young readers. Nearly 70 percent are under 35, and about 40 percent are under 25. Many are still in school, or just starting graduate programs or their first jobs.

That makes me genuinely glad. Because before I even registered this account, I wrote down in that notebook the community I wanted to serve, and the data reflects exactly that community. There’s something satisfying about that circle closing. It tells me the plan worked.

Gender-wise, it’s essentially even. It varies by topic. Women are more represented for gender-related pieces, men a bit more for politics and current affairs — but overall it balances out.

Tian Jian: After Tibetan activist Zhang Yadi (張雅笛) was arrested in September last year, New News CN co-published a report with Diyin (低音). That piece drew considerable criticism, with some arguing it could negatively affect efforts on her behalf. A month later, New News CN published a follow-up statement. How do you see those criticisms? Why did you choose to publish the report and then the statement?

XN: Overall, my sense is that even among people who share my values — even young Chinese people living abroad — understanding of what journalism is, and what independent media is, remains quite limited.

People felt that you should just cooperate, stay quiet, not write anything — that since the authorities haven’t confirmed the facts yet, why are you reporting? They treated official confirmation as an essential prerequisite. Clearly, having grown up in an environment where only official blue-and-white notices (藍底白字) exist [to report police and government information], with no real journalism, that social reality has been internalized as their cognitive framework.

The new generation places greater emphasis on individual rights and personal safety. That’s understandable, and it reflects broader social developments. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you approach a piece of reporting from an independent outlet outside the firewall and still insist on a concept of “safety” that has been manipulated by the authorities, things become very convoluted and strange.

Many readers have only a vague understanding of what journalism is, a vague understanding of human rights, and a vague understanding of what “solidarity” or “support campaigns” even mean. The rights struggles and protest movements that occurred in China — many date back seven or eight years, or further. For young readers, that history feels distant.

People have passion and a sense of justice, but because these concepts are unfamiliar, they end up criticizing reporting that advocates for solidarity. I’m willing to lay out those concepts and the reasoning behind the reporting again. Even if they still end up disagreeing, that’s fine. For similar situations in the future, people can refer back to it. That matters too.

Some time has passed — so why still issue the statement? Because discussion of these topics is severely lacking right now. Conversations about human rights and solidarity are rare. The most recent large-scale discussion was around the White Paper Movement (白紙運動), but even that was contentious. Before that, you’d have to go back to the era of Xu Zhiyong and Teng Biao [in the early 2000s]. There’s been a generational break in between.

People today are deeply unfamiliar with human rights struggles, civic movements, and the journalism that covers them — reporting on solidarity, on protest. So I feel an obligation to reconnect that lineage. That’s the first reason.

The second is that understanding of journalistic professionalism is also murky. Especially in a situation where people have escaped the iron fist of the Chinese Communist Party but haven’t fully broken free of it, and still face all manner of pressures. How do you uphold journalistic professionalism? Veteran journalists, when making the case, often invoke the public interest and public value, but they rarely elaborate. How do you balance competing public interests? How do you put professional ethics into practice?

I think I have the ability to explain these things more precisely — to build on what those who came before us have done. That’s why I felt the statement was necessary.

Did I anticipate the backlash before publishing that piece? Yes. The online debate had already erupted, and I knew that Chinese-language and simplified-Chinese online communities can be extremely volatile and chaotic — a lot of Cultural Revolution-era dynamics still operating within them. But I felt I couldn’t let fear stop me from publishing.

People today are deeply unfamiliar with human rights struggles, civic movements, and the journalism that covers them. So I feel an obligation to reconnect that lineage.

Tian Jian: Since the White Paper Movement, more and more Chinese-language independent media outlets have emerged. How do you see where things stand now?

XN: New News CN was founded in the post-White Paper period. A number of independent outlets had appeared — Aquarius Era, WOMEN我們, and others — and at the time I thought this was a trend, that more would follow. But that didn’t happen, which surprised me. I had assumed New News CN would be just one small shoot among many, and that the others would grow taller and stronger. They didn’t.

Later, when I talked with people in the field, I realized that most are stuck in the mindset of a staff writer. They used to be reporters; now they’ve left, so they become freelancers. That feels like the natural next step. But I want to encourage people to break out of that thinking, to put themselves in the role of an editor, to think about how a media outlet is structured, to observe what’s happening with a panoramic view, to plan an editorial positioning, to set up different issue frameworks.

The reason people are stuck is tied to social reality. Many young journalism graduates, even when they enter a media outlet, never get near politics, diplomacy, or economics. They’re assigned to a remote corner desk, focused on depth reporting within a very narrow slice of society. That reporting can be excellent — but it’s limited to social depth, and it can’t be translated into the foundations or model for running a media outlet. That’s a real loss. Eventually, even that kind of in-depth reporting became very difficult, and many people turned to nonfiction writing. Fine individual texts keep coming — like the work that comes out of the Frontline Fellowship, which I certainly couldn’t write — but beyond those individual pieces, there’s a vast wilderness that remains uncharted.

This has been the reality of China’s media ecosystem for many years. There is plenty of good individual writing, but few good media outlets emerging. Even after people leave China and escape the government’s control, this remains the case. I have great admiration for Initium Media, and it has inspired my own journalism practice in many ways. But the fact that everyone always mentions it is precisely because there’s nothing to replace it. That’s the problem.

The decentralized ecosystem of Chinese-language media has yet to take shape. So I strongly encourage peers — veterans and newcomers alike — to form a media operation together with a few good friends, something fully autonomous. That matters enormously for China’s media ecology and for the independent Chinese-language media landscape as a whole. It’s a message I try to convey both through New News CN and in interviews like this one.

Tian Jian: In the two years since New News CN launched, what challenges have you encountered, and what are your goals going forward?

XN: My goal is for New News CN to reach 10,000 followers. At that point I’d consider the account a success. Looking at some Chinese-language communities and information platforms, like “Citizens’ Daily” (公民日报) or “Northern Square” (北方广场), they have between 70,000 and 100,000 followers. I just want to be ten percent of that. Originally I set a three-year target of 10,000 followers, and now I realize how hard that is. So I’ll just keep going — whenever it happens, it happens.

The biggest gaps right now are that I don’t publish enough pieces and my updates are very irregular. That’s the main reason the account hasn’t grown as quickly as it could. New News CN is a one-person operation. Operating alone has its advantages — it’s safe, and it simplifies a lot — but the time and energy required to sustain it are chronically insufficient.

Running a one-person outlet isn’t just writing and finding collaborators. Since I’m operating on Instagram, I also have to think like a community manager — making graphics, posting frequently, and so on.

These days people scroll through social media every day and spend three seconds on each post. Thinking about how to capture someone’s attention, get them to actually read the article, and then share it — these are all important considerations, and they’re things I thought about before I even launched. For instance, every New News CN post starts with “Reading this will take approximately X minutes” — that’s grounded in empirical research. Telling readers upfront how long something will take, when it’s not too long, encourages them to read it to the end. Another example: every image I post has the New News CN logo on it, made deliberately large and bold — also designed to catch the eye.

The irregular posting schedule is partly because I’m someone who keeps a full life outside of this. I often do things that have nothing to do with journalism or politics. I don’t advocate for the monk’s approach, hunkering down at home writing drafts until you’re depressed and miserable. Living well comes first. But that also means New News CN updates less frequently than it should, and growth has been slower than expected.

Actually, the original plan for New News CN was short, punchy pieces, roughly 1,000 to 2,000 words, published frequently. That’s how you differentiate from other outlets.

But I found that sometimes writing short felt unsatisfying, or by the time I got to it, being short didn’t help anyway. I realized that fast, regular output is actually harder than grinding out a long piece. In practice, it’s been difficult to sustain.

Tian Jian: What does New News CN mean to you personally?

XN: You could say New News CN was founded for my own ideals. Not that the salary from my regular job is especially high. But I don’t need New News CN to make money. Delivering food pays better.

Saying it’s “for ideals” sounds grandiose and hollow. So let me try to say it more concretely. When I was doing media work before, I always felt small. I always doubted the meaning and value of what I was doing. That kind of self-doubt is a terrible feeling. Building this account was a way to stop tearing myself apart, to stop feeling like I was worthless.

So I could say, quite selfishly, that my starting point wasn’t social justice. It was making myself feel useful. And then I found that New News CN has in fact contributed something to the community of like-minded people, to civil society. And that’s enough.

The reason I care so much about my own sense of worth, about doing something meaningful, has to do with the circumstances in which my generation of Chinese people grew up. We pursued the spirit of freedom, and we lived through Zero-Covid and the White Paper Movement. Those are the nutrients of our formation. Starting this outlet is my own way of absorbing those nutrients, like photosynthesis, generating a positive cycle.

Actually, I think New News CN is saving me. It’s an act of self-rescue.

This interview was originally run in Chinese at Tian Jian.