Sixth Tone


Sixth Tone is an online magazine owned by the Shanghai United Media Group, a state-owned enterprise. It is published in English from China, and its readership is intended for people in Western countries.

Name

Sixth Tone's name relates to the number of tones in Mandarin Chinese, but also is stated to carry more metaphorical meaning as well. Mandarin Chinese has four active tones and a fifth dropped tone that has less prominence than the other four. Because of the language's five tones, the publication's name refers to an ideal of expanding beyond traditionally-reported items in Anglophone media; making it the "sixth tone".

History

The online magazine began publication on April 6, 2016, with an investment of $4.5 million U.S. dollars from the Shanghai United Media Group. It is a sister publication of The Paper. Wei Xing was its first editor-in-chief until May 30, 2016 when he moved to create a start-up company and therefore no longer worked for the paper. Succeeding Wei, Zhang Jun became the new editor-in-chief that year.
By 2018 Western media began to cite Sixth Tone in news reports. Vincent Ni, in an essay published in Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, stated that "For foreign journalists, it has also shown a diverse and authentic side of China that rarely received much attention elsewhere" and that the publication "has proved far more effective than the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in English-language news programmes by the state broadcaster Xinhua, CCTV and CRI."

Reception

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Foreign Policy stated that Sixth Tone has a less staid and "saccharine" tone compared to many other English-language publications from China. She stated "If webby U.S. media startup Vox were acquired by the Chinese Communist Party, it might resemble Sixth Tone".
In a 2016 interview with the New York Times, the then-editor-in-chief Wei Xing sought to differentiate his magazine to other Chinese English-language publications. Wei stated that compared to government-owned news publications, Sixth Tone would have an easier time growing since it "lacks a politics-saturated bureaucracy because it is a start-up".