How News Media Adapt to the Logic of WeChat Video Channels: A Multi-Modal Analysis of News Media Short Videos

Existing studies have shown that news organisations adapt unevenly to platform environments, but less is known about how such unevenness is produced in short-video contexts. Based on research on platformisation, platform logics, and differentiated newsroom adaptation, this article uses platform adaptation as an analytical lens to explore news organisations’ production-level strategic adjustments across audiovisual, temporal, and geo-spatial dimensions. Using a multimodal content analysis of 390 videos published by Chinese news media outlets on WeChat Video Channels (WVC), a short-video platform embedded in China’s dominant social media ecosystem, this paper compares adaptation across media origins and organisational hierarchies. The findings show that WVC encourages a shared short-video grammar, including background music, vertical format, on-site mobile recording, temporal de-anchoring, and localised content, but this grammar is enacted in institutionally differentiated ways. Platform conventions are translated into different audiovisual, temporal, and geo-spatial forms through two axes of institutional filtering: historically accumulated media legacies, encompassing newspaper-origin, broadcast-origin, and digital-native; and organisational hierarchies, distinguishing national, provincial, and local outlets. This framework helps explain how news organisations become platform-adaptive without necessarily becoming institutionally identical.