People confuse these two all the time. You see a well-made post on WeChat or a sharp video on Douyin and you think, well, that’s journalism, basically. It’s not in China. It’s not about the quality of your writing or how many followers you have. It’s about who the law says you are, what you’re allowed to do, and what happens if you act as if you’re not.
Who is really news media to start with? Those are the newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, news agencies and a few other bodies that have been formally approved and licensed by the state to collect and publish news. They’re state news bureaus. They have the full legal package: the right to report, the right to edit, the right to put out news under their own name. Self-media account is another story. You or a business or an organization signs up on WeChat, Weibo, Douyin or wherever and just starts to post. That doesn’t make you a news organization. You don have that legal identity and the system is designed so you never quite get it.
That’s why the licensing is so important. If you want to offer internet news information services (i.e. if you collect news, edit it, publish it or even just run a platform that spreads it), you need a specific license. News is news for the state whether it’s on a website, an app, a public account, a livestream, or anywhere. There are different flavors of that license but the one that allows you to actually go out and report and publish original news is reserved for real news units, the companies they control or units sitting under the propaganda system. Normal self-media is not eligible to apply. Full stop You are not in that business as far as the law is concerned.
The same principle applies to interview rights. In China, a press card is valid for a journalist on the job. That card is the sole official credential for news gathering inside the country. If you work for a news organization and don’t have one, you go on a date with someone who does. The law protects that work, and government offices are supposed to accommodate it. You, running a personal account, don’t have that card. You don’t have a legal right to go to a scene and treat it like a news interview. But if you go ahead and do that, you know, ask questions like a reporter, publish it as news without a license, you’re offside. They can shut the account down.
And what you can put out is narrower too. Licensed news services have to take it from a set list of central or provincial news outlets when they reprint. They have to cite the source, the original author, the original headline, the real name of the editor. They can’t spin the title or the facts and the trail has to be traceable. Self-media can report the news, but within those same guardrails, and you’re not supposed to go out and create current-affairs news yourself. Regulators have urged platforms to set up a separate category of “news account.” You show the license first to open one. Then you put the name of the organization and the license number where people can see it. That’s the show your badge rule. You shouldn’t have a normal self-media page and a licensed news page that look the same and users should be able to tell the difference.
The style of management is also different. Vertical systems are the way traditional news outlets operate: Party discipline, direct supervision from the relevant departments, and a wall between the newsroom and the business side. There is no reason why the actual gathering and editing of Internet news should be a field for private capital. Even those outlets are required to name an editor in chief who is responsible for what is published. There is no self media in that structure. You don’t have layers of internal editors that are signing off before something goes out. What you do get instead is the platform’s post hoc review, user reports, and whatever the cyberspace authorities are monitoring that month. That does not mean you are free. It means the legal risk is yours personally. There is no newsroom to take the rap.
That doesn’t mean self-media is cut out of the conversation entirely. There are plenty of working journalists who have a personal account and they try and keep the official reporting and the personal posting in separate boxes. If you’re a regular operator, you can still talk about your own life, give an opinion, do other types of content. What you cannot do is quietly transform the account into an unlicensed news desk for politics and current affairs. The important thing is to see where you really are. Self-media is not news media. It doesn’t replace the news media. This gap is not a technical problem, or something the internet hasn’t caught up with yet. That’s how the system was designed. Once you see that, a lot of the confusion, and a lot of the risk, becomes much easier to avoid.