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Digital Paper in China Covers Contentious Issues, Now in English

“We just tell the stories with a more human factor,” said Wei Xing, the editor of Sixth Tone, an English-language version of a publication overseen by the Chinese Communist Party.Credit...Eric LeLeu for The New York Times

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. On Wednesday it is set to publicly kick off 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 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.”

The debut comes at a complicated time for China’s 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 come amid 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.

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Employees working at The Paper’s Shanghai office. The online publication generally appeals to China’s educated and its millennials, known as the “post-90s” generation in China.Credit...Eric LeLeu for The New York Times

“There’s this very modern infrastructure, all these apps and very modernized packages that they’re disseminating, and it’s like a beautiful, beautiful house where the electrical wiring is missing,” said 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,” he said.

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 Kim Jong-un of North Korea 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 said.

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,” Mr. Wei said.

Still, Mr. Wei recognizes the limits. “Maybe sometimes when reports are published there may be some comments from certain government departments,” he said. Asked for examples at The Paper, he said, “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 organizations here that still have some original, quality content,” said 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.”

Ms. 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 health care. “I bet not many news organizations here are willing to spend time doing the firsthand reporting or have the guts to break this kind of news first,” Ms. Feng said.

China’s big technology companies have noticed the appetite for news. The Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce giant, last year agreed to buy a minority stake in the television and newspaper operator China Business News for nearly $200 million. Late last year it also purchased The South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, though executives have said they will use that to target a global audience.

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Sixth Tone’s newsroom in Shanghai. Its editor says he recognizes there will be limits under China’s tight state control.Credit...Eric LeLeu for The New York Times

The Communist Party’s flagship media are also trying to tap the trend. Last week the People’s Daily Online joined Shanghai United Media Group to announce a new app called Wuli, or “Mine.”

China’s traditional propaganda arms, like newspapers around the world, have struggled to catch up. Profitability in the newspaper and book publishing business has been dropping since the middle of last year, according to government statistics compiled by CEIC, a data provider, though experts say reliable data can be hard to get.

“Traditional media is in a major crisis as advertising falls,” said Zhong Xin, a professor of journalism at Renmin University of China. “Readers are leaving for online. Far fewer people are watching TV.”

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,” Mr. Wei said.

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,” Mr. Wei said.

Shanghai United Media Group is overseen by the city’s Communist Party Committee, and it owns a clutch of other Chinese media outlets. The group is initially investing 30 million renminbi in Sixth Tone, which plans to make money from advertising, Mr. Wei said.

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 said.

A correction was made on 
April 5, 2016

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the role of Wei Xing in the international expansion of a Chinese news outlet. He is the editor of Sixth Tone, the English-language version of The Paper; he is not the editor of The Paper.

How we handle corrections

Vanessa Piao in Beijing contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: New Tone in Chinese Media. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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