Participation in a campus publication led by students constitutes a valid complement to universities’ curricular activities: students can put their knowledge into practice in a creative and experimental context. College media, by operating as laboratories of “innovation and courage”, can shift students’ position from consumers of knowledge to creators of knowledge and this, in turn, can shape students’ professional and social identities (Shemberger, 2017; Norton, 2009). Despite the crucial role played by campus media in the formation of citizens, research into student-run journalistic outlets and the extent to which these contribute to widening both the empirical foundations of journalism studies and its theoretical tenets, has received scant attention. This paper documents the process of setting up a student magazine in a transnational university in China, taking as a case study the newly established bi-annual Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool university’s student magazine, X Mirror. First, it will address the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of involving students of journalism in an extra-curricular activity such as a campus publication. It will discuss the incentives and disincentives that students have in participating in non-credit bearing university activities in a competitive academic environment. Data obtained from semi-structured interviews will show how the students verbalized their experience of writing for the magazine, their reasons for joining the magazine, their expectations, the challenges they faced, the ways in which they felt rewarded by this experience and their vision of the magazine for the future. I argue that a highly target oriented approach to studying and a focus on grades might deter students from contributing to a student magazine. A utilitarian attitude is likely to inhibit their capacity to innovate in the field of news reporting beyond works assessed according to academic standards. The second part of the paper, drawing on the notion of aesthetic journalism, will examine through means of visual and textual analysis, the articles produced by students for the magazine. As we will see, the articles are intimistic forms of expression informed by an aesthetic ‘regime’, which has, using the terminology of Alfredo Cramerotti, the effect of challenging both Anglo-American and Chinese representational journalistic principles by favouring expression over representation. According to Cramerotti (2009), “Aesthetics is that process in which we open our sensibility to the diversity of the forms of nature […] and convert them into tangible experience”. The interviews with the students will show how they converted their observations of facts and interviews into artifacts that strive, by using aesthetics as an investigative tool, to convey knowledge projecting sentiments and impressions via written text and photos and the mis-en-page of the magazine. Ultimately, the magazine offers an ideal platform to observe how students in a transnational university in China make sense of the world through the medium of a campus magazine.