About Tianyan News

Tianyan News

Tianyan News, published at eyesnews.cn, is the digital news brand of the Guizhou Daily Media Group in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province in southwest China. Launched in 2019 as the group's flagship mobile-first news client, it succeeded the group's earlier newspaper apps and became the front end of its converged newsroom — publishing Guizhou original reporting, investigation and video under a single new brand. Its name, Tianyan, means "sky eye," a fitting emblem for a product designed to watch a whole province from one mobile screen. Tianyan News is the Guizhou Daily group's answer to the central question facing every Chinese provincial newspaper group in the convergence era: what does the party newspaper become when its readers live on their phones?

The parent: Guizhou Daily

The Guizhou Daily, the official newspaper of the Guizhou Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, was founded on 28 November 1949 under the original name New Guizhou Daily and renamed Guizhou Daily in 1957. Over the following decades it became the most widely circulated and influential comprehensive party newspaper in the province. The group built around it has grown into a comprehensive all-media operation encompassing four newspapers, six periodicals and six websites, integrating newspapers, periodicals, websites and mobile clients. That inheritance is Tianyan News's foundation: the app is not a startup news brand but the mobile flagship of the province's senior news institution, carrying its authority, its reporting staff and its provincial brief.

Convergence reform and the road to Tianyan

Tianyan News was the product of a deliberate reorganisation. In early 2017 the Guizhou Daily Newspaper Group reformed its organisational structure, functions and personnel to promote media convergence, establishing a Guizhou Daily All-Media Editorial Department; on 1 January 2017 it had officially launched a revamped Guizhou Daily, restructuring its theoretical pages and introducing a prominent commentary section. On the product side, the group had already launched its first official mobile news client, "Jin Guizhou," on 5 November 2015 — a key project in Guizhou's "Five Ones" three-dimensional network initiative, serving as the province's mainstream mobile news platform with responsibility for authoritatively releasing provincial party committee and government information on mobile devices. The Jin Guizhou client integrated resources and talent previously scattered across departments such as photography and technology, and passed 800,000 downloads. On the desktop side, the group integrated its website resources into the Jin Guizhou News Network. Tianyan News, launched in 2019, was the next step: a new flagship brand succeeding the earlier apps, built mobile-first rather than adapted from print, and published on the web at eyesnews.cn.

What Tianyan publishes

Tianyan News publishes Guizhou original reporting, investigation and video from the group's converged newsroom. Its agenda is the province seen whole: provincial party and government affairs; the economy of a province that spent a decade as one of China's fastest-growing; poverty alleviation and rural revitalisation in what was one of China's poorest provinces; transport megaprojects across mountainous terrain; ethnic culture in a province with large Miao, Dong, Bouyei and other minority populations; and the daily life of Guiyang and Guizhou's prefectures. The "original reporting and investigation" in its brief matters: the flagship client is where the group's own journalism — rather than wire copy — is showcased, in text, photography and the short-video formats a mobile-first brand requires.

Guizhou: the big-data province

No account of a Guizhou news brand is complete without the province's signature industry. Guizhou became China's first national big data pilot zone, with the State Council issuing guidelines to boost big data development and the province building "Guizhou on the Cloud," a platform for pooling and sharing government data across city and county governments; the first provincial-level regulation on information infrastructure in China had been passed by Guizhou in May 2014. Guiyang went further, adopting what was reported as the country's first local regulation on government data access and sharing, with millions of data records from 51 government bodies opened to the public after its platform launched in January 2017, and the province's data-sharing platform later assembled twelve subject databases, including a poverty-alleviation database of 203 million data points from fifteen provincial departments, cutting business-registration approval times to 2.2 working days. The China International Big Data Expo in Guiyang made the story international. A Guiyang newsroom's business desk lives inside this experiment, and Tianyan's coverage of the digital economy is coverage of its home province's chosen identity.

Converged newsroom model

Tianyan embodies the standard architecture of Chinese newspaper convergence at its most developed: one all-media editorial department gathering news once and publishing it many times — to the newspaper, the websites, the social accounts and, at the front of the queue, the flagship client. The group's own account of its reforms describes the logic precisely: integration of previously scattered departments, a single editorial centre, and products differentiated by platform rather than by newsroom. Tianyan News is the consumer-facing name of that system in Guizhou — the brand a reader in Guiyang actually opens — while the Guizhou Daily remains the institution behind it.

Place in Guizhou's media landscape

Guizhou's digital media include the group's own Jin Guizhou properties, municipal outlets in Guiyang and the prefectures, the provincial broadcaster's platforms, and national outlets' Guizhou channels. Tianyan News is distinct as the Guizhou Daily Media Group's flagship client brand: launched in 2019, succeeding Jin Guizhou-era apps, and published at eyesnews.cn. It should not be confused with the print Guizhou Daily, with the Jin Guizhou News Network website, or with similarly named "Tianyan" services in other industries — in Guizhou media, Tianyan is the newspaper group's news client.

Audience

The brand's primary audience is Guizhou's mobile readership — provincial residents following Guizhou affairs on their phones — together with the Guizhou diaspora elsewhere in China and the professional audience of officials, businesses and journalists for whom the party newspaper group's output is the province's statement of record. Its mobile-first design assumes the reader the 2015 Jin Guizhou launch already anticipated: one who expects authoritative provincial information to arrive as a phone notification, a video and a shareable story, not as tomorrow's printed page.

Why the brand matters

Tianyan News is a clean example of a wider Chinese pattern in which historic newspaper titles spawn new digital master brands. The Guizhou Daily's name carries institutional weight; Tianyan carries the product. The group's documented path — print flagship founded in 1949, all-media reform in 2017, a first client in 2015 that reached 800,000 downloads, and then a purpose-built flagship brand in 2019 — shows a provincial party newspaper group rebuilding itself around the phone while keeping its provincial brief intact. For readers outside China, eyesnews.cn is the most direct mobile window onto Guizhou's official journalism.

A note on the record

Unusually for a provincial app brand, Tianyan News's institutional background is documented in English-language scholarship: a peer-reviewed case study of the Guizhou Daily Newspaper Group's convergence practices, published through ChinaXiv in 2023, records the parent newspaper's 1949 founding and 1957 renaming, the group's structure of four newspapers, six periodicals and six websites, the 2017 all-media reforms and the Jin Guizhou client's launch and download figures on which this profile draws. That scholarly record, together with the group's launch coverage of Tianyan News in 2019 and the identity of eyesnews.cn, grounds the profile's account of how the brand emerged from the group's convergence programme.

Official website

Tianyan News is published from Guiyang at its official website, eyesnews.cn. It is the flagship digital news brand of the Guizhou Daily Media Group, launched in 2019.