About Kankanews

Kankanews

Kankanews, published at kankanews.com and based in Shanghai, China, is the online news platform of Shanghai Media Group — the digital face of one of the largest television news operations in China. Its name means, in effect, "watch the news," and that is what it was built to do: to take the reporting of Shanghai Television's news centre onto the internet and onto mobile phones. Kankanews is the website of SMG's converged media centre, the unit formed in June 2016 by bringing the existing Kankanews website together with the news resources of Shanghai's television and foreign-language channels. Every day that centre supplies news, commentary and legal and social-education programming to Dragon TV, Shanghai's News Comprehensive Channel, the Kankanews website and the International Channel Shanghai (ICS). Kankanews is therefore not a standalone web start-up but the online outlet of a broadcaster — operated, according to its own corporate information, by Kandongfang (Shanghai) Media Co., Ltd. — whose journalists, presenters and camera crews also produce Shanghai's main television news.

Roots in Shanghai Television's news centre

The organisation behind Kankanews predates the website's convergence-era relaunch. In December 2005 Shanghai Radio and Television Station created the SMG Television News Centre by integrating the news resources of Dragon TV (Oriental Satellite Television), the Shanghai Television News Comprehensive Channel and the news operation of the Shanghai Oriental Television entertainment channel. The centre assembled a professional staff of about 500 people and became one of the largest television news gathering, production and broadcasting organisations in China, and one of its most capable. That inheritance matters for understanding Kankanews: when the website later became the centre's online flagship, it drew on a newsroom that was already producing Shanghai's principal television bulletins, rather than building a reporting operation from nothing.

The 2016 convergence: the SMG Converged Media Centre

On 7 June 2016, building on the television news centre, Shanghai Radio and Television Station further integrated the news resources of the Kankanews website and the Shanghai foreign-language channel to establish the SMG Converged Media Centre. The move was part of the wave of media convergence — the merging of traditional broadcasting with internet and mobile distribution — that Chinese state media groups pursued in the middle of the 2010s. Kankanews was renamed in its new form as "Kankanews Knews" in June 2016, and the centre's structure meant a single newsroom now served television, the web and mobile audiences together. Song Jiongming, vice president of Shanghai Media Group, held the role of executive director of SMG News and Kankanews.com, a pairing of titles that captures exactly what the convergence was meant to achieve: one leadership, and one news operation, for broadcast and online news alike.

Knews24: the 24-hour internet news channel

The most visible product of the 2016 relaunch was a brand-new 24-hour internet news channel, Kankanews Knews24, which officially began broadcasting on 7 June 2016 alongside the new centre. Knews24 was an attempt to give an online news service the form of a television channel: continuous news, presented around the clock for internet viewers rather than in fixed bulletins. The experiment evolved over time. From 15 August 2018 Knews24 changed to a format based mainly on rolling news rotation and live coverage of major events, and all of its fixed programmes were discontinued. The channel itself stopped broadcasting on 13 November 2018. The website and app, however, continued — the durable legacy of the convergence was not the linear channel but the integrated newsroom behind Kankanews, which kept publishing online after Knews24 closed.

One newsroom, four destinations

Today the converged media centre supplies its output daily to four destinations: Dragon TV, the satellite channel that carries Shanghai's news to a national audience; the News Comprehensive Channel, Shanghai's local news channel, whose operation the centre is also responsible for; Kankanews itself, online; and the International Channel Shanghai, the foreign-language channel whose news resources were folded into the centre in 2016. The content supplied spans news, commentary, legal programming and social-education features. For Kankanews readers this structure means the website's video and text reporting comes from the same journalists who make Shanghai's television news — a reporter filmed interviewing readers at the 2018 Shanghai Book Fair, for example, carried a microphone bearing the Kankanews logo while the camera beside them carried Dragon TV and Shanghai Television branding. The centre is headquartered at the Shanghai Television building at 298 Weihai Road in Shanghai's Jing'an District.

Programmes behind the website

The programme brands produced by the centre give a picture of the journalism Kankanews carries online. On Dragon TV its news slots include the morning programme Kan Dongfang ("Watching the East"), the midday news and Dongfang News at 18:00 daily. On the News Comprehensive Channel they include Shanghai Morning, the community-focused Xinwen Fang, the main evening Xinwen Baodao bulletin, Xinwen Toushi, and the late Xinwen Yexian. Its current-affairs and legal programmes include Jinwan ("Tonight"), Global Crossroads — the in-depth international commentary programme fronted by Yuan Ming — Shuangcheng Ji, China Archaeology reports, the Yangtze Delta programme, and legal formats such as Anjian Jujiao, Fazhi Teqin Zu, Dongfang 110 and Tingshen Jishi. Shanghai Media Group's own channels present Kankanews as the group's official website, listing kankanews.com alongside its English-language ShanghaiEye site. Before 2019, documentaries made by the centre included the acclaimed medical documentary series Ren Jian Shi ("Life Matters"); from April 2019 SMG's documentaries were made by a separate documentary centre.

The science and technology channel

Kankanews continued to add vertical services inside the converged structure. On the morning of 25 March 2021 the SMG Converged Media Centre established a Science and Technology Communication Department, and the Kankanews science and technology channel went online at the same time. The addition reflected Shanghai's positioning of itself as a centre for science and technology innovation, and gave the Kankanews platform a dedicated channel for that coverage alongside its general news, commentary and legal output. It is an example of how the site developed after the Knews24 experiment ended: not as a single rolling channel, but as a website and app able to spin up specialist channels fed by the centre's departments.

The parent: Shanghai Media Group

Kankanews sits inside one of China's largest media organisations. Shanghai Media Group was formed in 2001 from the merger of the People's Radio Station of Shanghai, East Radio Shanghai, Shanghai Television Station and Oriental Television Station, and it ranks second in China after the national broadcaster. Its television business spans channels including Dragon TV, the News Channel, the finance channel China Business News and International Channel Shanghai, alongside extensive radio services, newspapers and magazines including Yicai's financial titles, and new-media operations. At the 2019 Shanghai TV Festival, the group's convergence work was presented by its own executives as part of the industry's central question — how to integrate the resources of traditional television with new media while keeping online content original — and SMG's vice president appeared in his capacity as executive director of both SMG News and Kankanews.com.

Reorganisation in 2024

The converged structure was reorganised again in the station's most recent reforms. On 25 September 2024 the former Dragon TV centre, documentary centre and converged media centre were dissolved and merged to form a new converged media centre for Shanghai Radio and Television Station. The change folded the satellite channel's operations directly into the same unit that runs the online news service, extending the logic begun in 2016 — one integrated centre responsible for gathering and producing news across television and internet platforms. Through that reorganisation, Kankanews remains the website of the centre, continuing to publish the station's reporting at kankanews.com.

What Kankanews represents

Kankanews represents a particular model of Chinese online news: not a commercial portal or an independent digital start-up, but the internet platform of a major metropolitan broadcaster, rebuilt through deliberate institutional mergers. Its history runs from the 2005 consolidation of Shanghai's television news resources, through the 2016 creation of the converged media centre and the short-lived Knews24 channel, to the science-channel launch of 2021 and the wider merger of 2024. For readers, it is the place where Shanghai Media Group's television journalism appears online — Shanghai city news, national and international reporting from the centre's correspondents, including its reporters posted in Tokyo and Washington, commentary and legal programming — published under a single brand that has come to stand for the whole of SMG's news output on the internet.