The Pivot Towards Self: The Decade-Long Evolution of In-Depth Reporting on WeChat

In-depth reporting serves a crucial public interest by delving beyond surface-level facts toprovide context, analysis, and hidden truths on complex issues, thereby enabling a better-informed public. However, its evolution in China’s digital media remains insufficientlyexamined. Existing research on China’s media transformation has largely focused on statemedia, leaving a gap in comprehensive, longitudinal analyses of alternative digital genres.This article addresses this gap by constructing a longitudinal corpus of 42,472 articles from16 leading in-depth reporting accounts on WeChat spanning 2013 to 2025. Using compu-tational methods, this study examines shifts in narrative style, moral framing, thematicfocus, and the evolving conception of 'truth.' Findings reveal an emerging reporting stylethat increasingly prioritizes 'care,' focusing on personal experiences and individual truthsover systemic or institutional analysis. Coverage of social systems, crime, and legal caseshas declined markedly, while broader reform-focused narratives have largely disappearedover the past decade. These changes offer a granular, longitudinal picture of how China’sdigital media landscape has evolved and reconfigured in a dynamic yet constrained manner.