China’s media organisations’ adoption of the WeChat public platform: news flow network, exploitation and exploration

ABSTRACT This paper takes a longitudinal perspective to explore China’s media organisations’ adoption of the WeChat public platform. Drawing from theories of organisation ecology and strategic exploitation/exploration, this paper identifies three strategies that media outlets adopted: borrowing other media outlets’ content to form news flow networks, exploiting existing news production routines and exploring new forms of content creation by incorporating social media sources. Stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOM) were built to understand how thirty-five media outlets built news flow networks on WeChat and how such networks coevolved with exploitation and exploration. The results showed that media outlets could mobilise audiences and exhibit identity through news flow networks; although exploitation reduced organisations’ dependence on the community, exploration was not found to make media outlets more popular.