Reconstructing Local News Innovation Through Livestream Clip Videos: A Case Study of the WeChat Video Channel “Qinchang City”

Abstract

Against the combined pressure of digital technological iteration and platform operational logic, traditional local news faces development bottlenecks and urgently needs to explore sustainable innovative transformation paths. Taking the WeChat Video Channel Qinchang City as the research case, this paper adopts a single-case study approach with multi-source data triangulation, drawing on project proposals, clip video analysis, and in-depth semi-structured interviews to systematically examine its integrated livestreaming-clip slicing production and dissemination model as well as its internal operational mechanisms. The findings reveal that the channel’s journalistic innovation is built on a three-dimensional collaborative integration framework. At the organizational level, it constructs a semi-public and semi-private hybrid operation mechanism, realizing a dynamic balance between government collaborative tasks and independent editorial autonomy. At the spatial level, it breaks the confinement of traditional studio reporting, takes urban physical space as an immersive narrative field, and embeds urban governance goals into daily civic life via a soft politicization narrative strategy. At the dissemination level, it converts livestream raw footage into short clip videos to achieve long-tail cyclic distribution, which not only dismantles the hierarchical labor structure of traditional newsrooms but also reconstructs the temporal logic of local news production. This study verifies that resource-constrained medium-sized local media can strike a pragmatic balance between professional journalistic rigor, institutional coordination, and algorithmic traffic visibility through organizational hybridization, spatial narrative reconfiguration, and cyclic content dissemination. It deepens the theoretical cognition of the spatial embeddedness and iterative evolution of local journalism in the platform era, and provides a replicable practical paradigm for medium-sized local media to reshape civic emotional consensus and realize digital innovative transformation.