Photojournalism has had a late start in China. The profession, which only began to thrive in China in the 1990s, hasn’t enjoyed the long and celebrated status it has in the West. Today, under the pressure of tightening censorship, stagnating income, and technology disruption, photojournalists are exiting the field in large numbers. But a small group of photographers are still dedicated to telling stories about China in a time of sweeping change.

From propaganda tool to market-oriented journalism: a quick run-down

Since the founding of Communist China in 1949 until the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s, the sole purpose of Chinese media was to serve as the government’s mouthpiece. Photography, without exception, existed as a propaganda tool. Changes only came in the 1990s, a decade after China embarked on economic and political reforms under Deng Xiaoping’s “Opening Up and Reform” policy. As the country transitioned into a market-oriented economy, newspapers and tabloids that rely on advertising revenues emerged, such as the The Southern Metropolis Daily, Oriental Morning Post, and Beijing News, to name a few. Although still overseen by the government, these market-oriented media organizations began producing content that examined and investigated social and human-interest topics, sometimes at the risk of being censored.

The success of market-oriented media quickly fostered a crop of professional photojournalists, who, without formal training, turned to their western counterparts, carefully imitating the styles and trends of photography that appeared on newspaper front pages and on agency wires such as that of Reuters and AP. “Chinese photojournalists began to talk about how photographs shouldn’t be staged and instead should be more about the moments and reality,” Chang He, a former photojournalist and photo director who twice judged the World Press Photo Contest, said. “It is at that time that Chinese photographers began to win awards abroad.”

The “golden decade” of journalism in China abruptly came to an end as online news portals, such as Tencent and Sina, arrived in full force in the mid 2000s. Facing declining circulation and lost ad revenue — similar to the experience of their western counterparts—newsrooms began to cut down photo staff or force them to produce videos. Meanwhile, new and well-funded internet companies not only produced a vast amount of original photo reportage with a small in-house editorial team, but also republished high-quality photo stories through partnerships with traditional newspapers that typically had badly designed websites and small audiences online. To increase page views, photo slideshows with 20 to 30 images became the default way of presentation on many portals, much like news websites in the west.

How the rise of WeChat, “self-media”, and AI algorithms are changing photojournalism

As of December 2017, China has 772 million internet users, more than half of its 1.4 billion citizens. More than 90 percent of them are online via their mobile devices. The era of “self-media” dawned with the rising popularity of Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, which was launched in 2009, and two years later, WeChat, an all-in-one social messaging app from which most of China’s app-savvy netizens now get their news.

Besides WeChat, internet users also read on digital news portal apps such as Toutiao, Sina, and Tencent, which also owns WeChat. These platforms aggregate content from legacy news providers and bloggers alike, but WeChat is still the most noteworthy thanks to its large user base (700 million), and its “public account” feature that allows legacy media, individual opinion leaders, and average people to publish their own content without many barriers (except algorithms that help catch politically sensitive words in posts and subsequently prevent them from being published). Today, there are more than 10 million public accounts on WeChat. Popular accounts monetize their viewerships through ad sponsors as well as a function that allows readers to tip them directly. (To learn more about how WeChat works and how that changed the journalism industry in China, read this article.)

In a content acquisition rush, digital platforms across the board have launched initiatives to attract user-generated content (UGC) from people who have a substantial following with the promise of big profits. Powered by artificial intelligence, news portals like Tencent and Toutiao are able to push more targeted content to their readers. Toutiao, whose tagline is “the only headlines are those you care about”, even claims that it can have a user figured out within 24 hours based on their reading preference and location, according to the Nieman Lab.

As a result, a large number of former photojournalists and amatuer photographers have signed up to publish on these platforms. This monetization method, which depends solely on clicks, encourages them to produce crowd-pleasing content that is high on emotion and low on journalistic values.

Yang Shenlai, a photo editor on Tencent’s small editorial team, said that this mode of self-publishing will naturally lead to photographers putting a stop on perfecting their skills or pursuing in-depth stories that are time consuming or politically sensitive. In fact, it has already diminished the quality of photojournalism in China. “Some photographers think that the audience wouldn’t tell the difference if they only spent 60 or 80 percent of their effort doing a story,” he added.

“Algorithms, as a way to improve efficiency in content distribution, are definitely the future, but today they still have many shortcomings, so they can’t completely replace the work of an editor,” he said. “Some photographers spend half an hour shooting a sensational story that can easily get millions of hits, but the stories someone spent a month or a half year producing will, at best, reach this number.”

Now, the rise of “self-media” is even forcing digital sites that supported editorial teams to downsize their photo departments, tilting their strategies to become more UGC friendly, leaving the photojournalists and photo editors there uncertain about their future. “The editorial teams within these internet tech giants are very marginalized,” he said, “In the era of self-media now, they can actually meet the content demand without having to support editorial staff.”

In fact, the photo section Yang led at Tencent has recently undergone structural change. Tencent “Living”, a channel widely respected for publishing quality photojournalism with a large following, announced its closure this May, after publishing 724 photo stories over the past eight years. Yang and his four photojournalists will continue to work under “Guyu”, another Tencent vertical for non-fiction. The change is the result of an effort to integrate the editorial team across text, photography, video, data and graphics, which inevitably sidelined photography, as Guyu is focused on long-form stories that are mostly text-oriented. That is also true in many other newsrooms, especially digital ones. Prioritizing for mobile devices, photo editors tend to use photos to compliment text in a one-scroll page format, which indirectly discourages the limited number of photojournalists from exploring the full strength of the medium to tell stories, reducing them once again to a supporting role.

Caixin Weekly, which reserves at least six pages for a photo story in each issue, is the last of its kind. Liang Yingfei, a photojournalist there, said that her main job is creating photo stories, but she also needs to write the text that goes with her photo reportage and shoot video footage sometimes. It’s impossible to get everything done all by herself, but different elements inform each other. Information in her text will help to better understand the story and improve her visuals, she said.

“Bringing back a product that has various elements is deeply rooted in the consciousness of Chinese photographers now,” said Chang He, whose own career trajectory evolved from being a photographer, to photo editor, to visual director, to now the co-founder of Pear Video, one of China’s largest video news platforms. “It’s even normal now for photographers to provide edited videos.”

It is true that Chinese photojournalists are incredibly adaptive to new technology and tools. When we visited newsrooms and met with photojournalists in early 2016, many of them have developed video skills and were already experimenting with drones and 360 cameras. In August 2015, when the deadly Tianjin Explosion happened and the government subsequently limited press access, photojournalist Chen Jie flew his drone over the site of the disaster and captured an image that ultimately won him an award in the World Press Photo Contest the following year: