The aggregation effect of mainstream media news curation from the perspective of liquid Journalism theory

Abstract

The empowerment of social media audience, rise of platform media make news production shift towards short videos, the transformation of information and meaning production paths has also led to the decentralization and continuous fluidity of social concepts. However, if we focus on the specific news practices of mainstream media in China, in most cases, we can still see the guiding discourse, spontaneous identification and positive interaction of audiences with the issue framework. While highlighting the successful digital transformation of China’s mainstream media, this paper also observes the tension between theory and practice in rebuilding centrality and discourse power in the general context of decentralization. In the era of digital journalism, mainstream media can still tap into the potential of user-generated content through news curation, generating a converging effect and establishing user loyalty to the media itself within the limitations of platform tone. This paper conducts content analysis and multimodal discourse analysis on selected popular news curation from People’s Daily and Xinhua News Agency, using liquid journalism as a theoretical lens to explore the converging effect of mainstream media news curation in the new media era.