Against the backdrop of algorithmic recommendation reconstructing the news communication ecosystem,short-video platforms have become the core field of information dissemination. “New yellow journalism”,driven by algorithmic empowerment and visual elements, has gradually penetrated into the content production system of mainstream media. As the core subject responsible for the dissemination of mainstream values and guidance of public opinion, the adaptation dilemma of mainstream media between traffic logic and public service attributes has become an important issue in the development of journalism industry in the algorithmic era. Existing studies have mostly focused on the phenomenological description and theoretical deduction of “new yellow journalism” in self-media, lacking a mechanistic interpretation of the relevant practices of mainstream media. Moreover, the research paradigm dominated by qualitative analysis is difficult to address core issues such as the influence mechanism of communication power and users’ psychological responses.This study adopts computational communication methods, selects five major mainstream media accounts on short-video platforms as research samples, and collects multi-year data of short-video works and user comments to conduct empirical analysis. A multi-dimensional quantitative model of communication power is constructed to comprehensively consider user interaction behavior indicators. Methods such as the Kruskal-Wallis test and multiple regression analysis are used to examine the correlation between reporting styles,news elements, and communication power. With the help of a two-dimensional coding scheme of emotional valence and arousal, this study employs the GPT4o-mini model to quantitatively code user comments,thereby systematically presenting the long-term trends in users’ emotional response.The research findings indicate that “new yellow journalism” from mainstream media has exhibited a fluctuating growth trend in recent years, with significant differentiation in content production strategies between central media and local media; the user repost volume of “new yellow journalism” is remarkably higher than that of other categories, and short-duration content within 30 seconds is more likely to gain communication advantages;among the influencing factors of communication power,narrative storytelling and complete news elements(5W1H:Who,What,When,Where,Why,How)have a positive promoting effect,while common methods such as clickbait,sensationalism and exaggeration have a negative effect;users’ emotional responses to “new yellow journalism” show a fluctuating positive trend, but the arousal level has decreased year by year over time, exhibiting characteristics of emotional fatigue.This study is the first to focus on mainstream media as the research object, expanding the research boundaries of “new yellow journalism”; it constructs an analytical framework of “technological logic - production mechanism - emotional effect”, revealing the mutually constitutive mechanism among technology, production, and emotion. Based on the entropy weight method, this study uses a quantitative evaluation model of communication power to comprehensively reveal the communication mechanism of “new yellow journalism”, providing early warnings for mainstream media to balance the “mouthpiece function” and traffic logic, and empirically demonstrating the complex tensions in the news ecosystem in the algorithmic era.
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