State control can turn the media into the government’s mouthpiece and weaken the media’s incentives to meet market demands for corporate news. We study China’s official party newspapers and commercially oriented, non-official newspapers and find that despite official party newspapers’ heavier state control, they continue to play an informational role by providing a different type of news than non-official newspapers. We show that compared to non-official newspapers, official newspapers provide a greater proportion of value-relevant industry and market-wide information relative to firm-specific information.