“Locality” originates from human geography, emphasizing the unique history, culture, social relations and emotional identity within a specific geographical space. This concept was later introduced into the field of news communication and became an important dimension for evaluating the value and effectiveness of local media communication. Local communication not only means that the content occurs in a place, but also emphasizes the degree of embeddedness of communication activities in the place, building an emotional connection and identity between the audience and the place.

As the “last mile” of communication capacity building, county integrated media centers shoulder the important mission of being based on the local area and serving the local area ([3]). The content construction of county-level integrated media focuses on local content production, in which “locality” highlights “embeddedness” or “rootedness”, which refers to the media’s role reconstruction from information transmitter to regional service provider by deeply adapting to the culture (such as language, narrative style) and social needs of the target area ([10]). As an important practical carrier of county-level integrated media, agricultural programs focus on serving agriculture, rural areas, and farmers (“agriculture, rural areas, and farmers”). Its form iterates with media technology, showing the evolutionary trajectory of McLuhan’s “medium is the message” ([9]).

County-level integrated media agricultural programs rely on the geographical space of the county, focus on local agricultural production, farmers’ real needs and other content, and achieve emotional resonance and value recognition with the audience through localized narrative methods, interactive models and service methods, and ultimately promote the revitalization and development of county-level rural areas. The core elements include content localization, service precision and interactive localization. The three are interrelated and support each other, and together they form a complete system for the local dissemination of agricultural programs through integrated media in the county.

For analytical consistency, this paper operationalizes locality into three interwoven dimensions to examine county agricultural programs.

Content localization: Rooted in local farming, rural scenery and native culture with place-specific narratives instead of universal templates.

Service precision: Targeted technical, policy and market support for diverse local agricultural practitioners.

Localized interaction: Township-based two-way communication to update program content via audience needs.

The following case analysis of Let’s Farm Together centers on this three-dimensional framework.

The continuous and in-depth advancement of the rural revitalization strategy can provide macro-level policy guidance for the local dissemination of agricultural programs by Changxing County Media Convergence Center. As a grassroots practice carrier, county media convergence center has gradually become an information hub connecting urban and rural areas, and also plays a bridging role between policy implementation and the needs of the masses ([13]). From the perspective of actual needs, Changxing County, as a strong grain and oil county in my country, has many practical needs such as agricultural technology promotion, support for new farmers’ entrepreneurship, and inheritance of rural culture. However, traditional agricultural programs still have problems such as homogenization of content and insufficient service targeting, making it difficult to meet the actual needs of local farmers. In the context of media convergence development, if Changxing County Media Convergence Center wants to achieve differentiated competition, it must closely follow the actual situation of the region, deeply explore local resources, create agricultural programs with regional characteristics, and then enhance the influence of the programs and audience stickiness through local dissemination ([1]). Compared with other counties, Changxing has a clear first-mover advantage. As early as 2011, the local area began to explore media convergence reform, which was nearly seven years earlier than the nationwide launch of county-level media convergence center construction. It has also accumulated rich local communication experience.

Changxing County’s Integrated Media Center began exploring integrated media reform in 2011, establishing a county-level all-media group. In 2018, it became a site for observation at the Central Propaganda Department’s on-site meeting on the construction of county-level integrated media centers, and its development model gained national recognition. After more than ten years of development, Changxing Media Group has become a national media integration pioneer unit and a national high-tech enterprise. Its radio, television, and new media external publicity rankings have consistently ranked among the top county-level stations in the province ([5]).

From 2022 to 2024, Changxing Integrated Media rolled out three award-winning agricultural programs in sequence, each claiming the first prize of Zhejiang Provincial Television for Agriculture Activity Award in its respective year: Go for It! Rural Dream Makers (2022), Cultivate! Returning Youth (2023), and the benchmark program Let’s Farm Together (2024). The series of programs has formed a diversified agricultural content matrix covering agricultural technology popularization, rural culture display and farmer entrepreneurship stories. The content covers multiple aspects such as agricultural technology guidance, rural culture display, and farmer storytelling, forming a diversified agricultural program matrix, which provides strong media support for the rural revitalization and development of Changxing County. Among them, “Let’s Farm Together” is a benchmark program that focuses on the relevant content of agricultural production innovation. Through the model of “video broadcast + live interaction + on-site selection”, it showcases the new look of new rural areas, new agriculture and new farmers. The live broadcast of the program during its final stage had more than 80,000 views, the total number of reads on the client exceeded 100,000, the TV rating exceeded 4.2%, and the publicity reached more than 300,000 people in 16 townships (streets and parks) in Changxing County. It also attracted nearly 100 outstanding young people to join the team of returning to their hometowns to farm, and has a very wide social influence ([14]). (Data source: Internal research paper by journalists of Changxing Integrated Media Center ([14]))

This study adopts a qualitative single-case study design, taking the 2024 agricultural program Let’s Farm Together produced by Changxing Integrated Media Center as the research object, covering its full production and dissemination cycle from January to December 2024.

The data sources include program episodes, final live-stream recordings, official media publications, and an internal evaluation report issued by Changxing Integrated Media Center ([14]).

Guided by the three-dimensional locality framework (content localization, service precision, and localized interaction), this study employs thematic coding to conduct qualitative analysis of program materials, focusing on narrative content, character construction, regional symbols, and grassroots discourse. The analysis is further interpreted through locality theory, media convergence theory, and symbolic interaction theory to ensure analytical consistency across dimensions.

The program “Let’s Farm Together” revolves around the local agricultural resources of Changxing County, combining traditional planting culture with modern agricultural development concepts to create program content with regional distinctiveness. Simultaneously, the program transforms abstract agricultural production knowledge into disseminable narrative texts, making local experiences visible, readable, and relatable. The program changes the old model of one-way content delivery for agricultural programs, truly achieving two-way interaction with the audience. The program uses the “Changxing in Your Hand” client, a new media platform under Changxing Media Group, and has specially set up a viewer comment section and interactive topics, encouraging farmers to share their accumulated experience in planting and the challenges they encountered when starting a business. In addition, the program also holds offline events, inviting program guests to interact face-to-face with the audience, forming a two-way interactive model of “online interaction + offline exchange”, enhancing the connection between the program and the audience. The “Quick Q&A on Farming” segment in the final event featured questions tailored to the contestants’ characteristics by the farming observation team and the returning team. This showcased the solid professional knowledge and keen innovative thinking of agricultural workers, allowing viewers to more directly experience the charm of agriculture. The program focused on the unique agricultural models of Changxing. The rice-vegetable rotation model revitalized land resources, significantly increasing the yield per acre, with related agricultural products sold to major domestic supermarkets and overseas markets such as Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. Rice-shrimp co-culture, based on ecological farming principles, reduced the use of pesticides and fertilizers, achieving cost reduction and efficiency improvement. The rice-frog symbiosis model adhered to green ecological concepts, creating a high-quality agricultural product industrial chain, forming a large-scale industry of shared prosperity, and driving income growth for over a thousand households.

The program breaks away from the elitist narrative perspective of traditional agricultural reporting, focusing instead on ordinary local farmers, returning new farmers, grassroots village cadres, and local agronomists—constructing a localized and relatable portrait of rural figures. Abandoning grandiose and unrealistic narratives, the program uses the real experiences of individuals—their labor, entrepreneurial stories, and production experiences—as its entry point, allowing rural communication to return to the grassroots level. This not only bridges the psychological distance between the media and rural audiences but also authentically portrays the vibrant reality of agricultural production and rural development in Changxing. The production team of “Let’s Farm Together” conducted in-depth research in various townships of Changxing to collect farmers’ needs in agricultural production and entrepreneurial development, precisely addressing the actual needs of local farmers in designing program content. Regarding agricultural technical services, the program invites experts from the Changxing County Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau to go into the fields to provide on-site guidance to farmers on issues such as pest and disease control and soil improvement, disseminating this information through videos and other means. In terms of dissemination effects, different types of rural entities have achieved experience sharing and resource sharing through the program platform: experienced farmers share traditional farming experience, post-90s new farmers popularize mechanized and intelligent planting technologies, cross-industry entrepreneurs share brand building ideas, and diverse entities form a positive relationship network of mutual assistance and collaborative development, making the program an important vehicle for uniting the efforts of rural development.

Symbols in communication are not only carriers of information, but also carry specific value recognition and emotional connection. The program “Let’s Farm Together” extracts agricultural symbols with Changxing regional characteristics and constructs a distinctive Changxing agricultural image. At the level of visual symbols, the program uses visual elements such as hand-drawn illustrations, rural scenes, and characteristic planting and breeding bases to transform farmland, planting and breeding greenhouses, and characteristic agricultural products into iconic visual symbols, reconstruct the visual expression of agricultural production scenes, create a visual landscape with both local flavor and communicative power, and awaken the local audience’s rural memories ([7]). At the level of brand symbols, the program focuses on promoting local agricultural brands such as “Xiangli Guxiang” and “Changxing Rice Frog”, fully presenting the circulation links of agricultural products from the fields to supermarkets, from the local area to the whole country and even overseas, and strengthening the audience’s awareness of local agricultural brands. At the level of symbolic imagery, the program, combined with the county’s agricultural transformation practices, shapes three local rural images: “innovation, ecology, and common prosperity”. Through scenarios such as ecological farming, agricultural technology services, and youth returning to their hometowns, it interprets the development philosophy of modern agriculture in Changxing and conveys the vision of common prosperity in rural areas. The entire system of local symbols becomes an important link for interaction between the audience and the program: the audience develops emotional resonance based on familiar regional symbols, actively participating in online discussions and offline interactive activities; the program further optimizes symbolic expression and content direction based on audience feedback, forming a cyclical interactive mechanism of “symbol output-audience resonance-interactive feedback-content optimization”. The superimposed dissemination of local symbols not only enhances the program’s recognizability but also strengthens the cultural sense of belonging among the county’s residents.

The localization of the program’s function requires it to adapt to the rural communication context, relying on a localized discourse system to achieve efficient information delivery, cultural inheritance, and industrial empowerment. This is also an important manifestation of the grassroots service function of agricultural programs. “Let’s Farm Together” completely abandons the formulaic and serious broadcasting style of mainstream media, constructing a localized, everyday, and grassroots discourse system, forming a communication language mechanism adapted to the rural setting. The program uses colloquial expressions familiar to villagers throughout, incorporating a large amount of Changxing local dialect, agricultural proverbs, and rural sayings, paired with real shooting scenes in fields and farmyards, stripping away the sophisticated packaging of media and brimming with the warmth of rural life. In interpreting professional content, the program transforms professional agricultural models such as “rice-vegetable rotation” into popular, rural expressions like “both people and fields are not idle”, using language easily understood by farmers to explain modern agricultural knowledge, lowering the threshold for receiving professional content. This choice of language aligns with the thinking habits and cognitive levels of rural audiences, effectively reducing the distance between media and audiences and achieving efficient content dissemination and emotional empathy. From a functional perspective, the local language system not only serves as an information dissemination tool but also carries the function of preserving local culture. Content such as dialect exchanges, agricultural proverbs, and everyday dialogues continuously spread Changxing’s local agricultural culture and strengthen the regional identity of the county’s residents. At the same time, the down-to-earth language makes services such as agricultural technology guidance, policy interpretation, and entrepreneurial experience sharing more easily accepted by farmers, fully leveraging the program’s core functions of serving agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, and empowering local industries, thus achieving a unity of dissemination and social service functions.

“Let’s Farm Together” achieved the dual effect of content co-creation and practical transformation through localized communication. In the era of converged media, the interactivity of the network makes the audience a “participant” in information production. Information is no longer simply “pushed” to consumers, but is instead placed on the media, breaking the traditional static information model, attracting the attention of the audience, and enhancing the audience’s experience and memory depth during the participation process ([4]). The program broke the traditional model of “one-sided production by the media and passive viewing by the audience”, and attracted farmers, new farmers and agricultural technology experts to participate in the content planning and creation. It took 13 local farmers from Changxing as the core creative subjects, covering traditional farmers born in the 1960s to young new farmers born in the 1990s, and built a localized co-creation production system.

At the practical level, the program provided new farmers with increased public exposure, creating opportunities for them to develop personal profiles and promote agricultural products; at the closing ceremony, a study tour to explore the road to common prosperity was launched simultaneously, opening up a channel for online traffic to be converted into offline practical guidance. The program covered all 16 townships and subdistricts in Changxing. According to the internal evaluation report of Changxing Integrated Media Center ([14]), nearly 100 young people participated in local agricultural entrepreneurship after the program. With the support of the live broadcast at the end of the season, the program successfully attracted nearly 100 young people to return to their hometowns to engage in agriculture, expanding the local new farmers team, changing young people’s stereotypes about farming, and suggesting that media dissemination may have contributed to attracting young talent to return to local agriculture.

The case suggests that the localized dissemination of “Let’s Farm Together” contributed to reshaping relationships between county-level integrated media and farmers, between farmers, and between farmers and the market, thus uniting local development efforts ([8]). In terms of the relationship between the media and farmers, the program has changed farmers’ perception of the media through precise services and interactions, making county-level integrated media a trusted medium for farmers. As agronomist Liu Weina said in the sixth episode: “We care more about the growth of crops in the fields than farmers do. We take planting novices to real agricultural professionals so that they can grow high-quality crops, increase production and income, and sell at better prices.” This in-depth service relationship has transformed the media from an information publisher to a partner in agricultural development.

In terms of the relationship between farmers, the communication platform built by the program has promoted experience sharing and cooperation among growers, forming a good atmosphere of mutual assistance. Gui Xingqiang led surrounding farmers to plant more than 1000 mu of dryland crops, and Wu Chuanyi’s rice-frog co-prosperity base covered more than 20,000 mu, driving more than 1000 households to participate in joint operations, all of which reflect the deepening of cooperative relationships among farmers. Regarding the relationship between farmers and the market, the program connects e-commerce platforms with agricultural enterprises, opening up sales channels for farmers and solving the problem of “difficulty in selling” agricultural products. Shi Shuangyan’s family farm promoted its “Lvshan Lvzhenfeng” green brand rice, and Zhou Hongxing’s ambition to create Changxing’s own high-quality rice brand and promote it nationwide demonstrates the media’s bridging role in market connections. By reconstructing these three relationships, the program united various forces in Changxing County’s agricultural development, injecting strong endogenous momentum into rural revitalization.

In terms of empowering agriculture, the program promoted the large-scale and branded development of agriculture in Changxing County by disseminating agricultural technology, supporting new farmers to start businesses, and promoting specialty agricultural products. Xu Guocheng’s 3200-mu rice-vegetable rotation base, Lu Jiajia’s mechanized management of 436.6 mu of farmland, and Liu Huazhong’s increased yield of 50 - 100 jin per mu by relying on fertilization technology. Professor Zhu Zengrong of Zhejiang University commented that the program focused on showcasing the combination of young new farmers’ sentiments and new technologies, and the replicable income-generating model.

The program recorded relatively high viewership and dissemination indicators. Its localized characteristics are considered a contributing factor according to the internal evaluation report. The live broadcast of the program’s finale had over 80,000 views, the client had accumulated over 100,000 reads, and the TV viewership exceeded 4.2%. It won the first prize of the 2024 Zhejiang Province “TV for Agriculture Activities” and became a localized benchmark for county-level agricultural programs nationwide ([14]). Following the closing event, the “Exploring the Path to Common Prosperity Study Tour” began with a visit to the Daoxiang Tianyuan project in Chenjiabang Village, Lijiaxiang Town. The county’s Youth League Committee organized 10 new farmers to discuss their experiences with “farming expert” Feng Bo, further expanding the program’s influence. Simultaneously, the program’s successful dissemination model provided a model for other agricultural programs within the Changxing Media Group, promoting the development of the entire agricultural program matrix and maximizing media dissemination effectiveness.

County society presents significant diversity and differences in cultural forms, economic structures, landforms and spatial distribution. This also determines that county-level integrated media must be based on local realities and form content advantages with local recognition ([13]). “Let’s Farm Together” selected thirteen local farmers for video broadcast based on the actual situation of agricultural production in Changxing County, which truly presented the local new planting and breeding model and effectively avoided grand expressions that were divorced from the reality of the countryside. However, in terms of content depth, the program suffers from incomplete coverage of local issues and insufficient in-depth professional analysis. Firstly, while highlighting Changxing’s distinctive agricultural models such as rice-vegetable rotation, rice-shrimp co-culture, and rice-frog symbiosis, it fails to cover more core local industries like Changxing hanging melons and freshwater aquaculture. Secondly, the program lacks systematic explanation of agricultural techniques, relevant policy backgrounds, and potential risks in production practices. For example, regarding rice-frog symbiosis, it only showcases the increased income without systematically explaining practical aspects like water quality control and pest management. The content remains at the level of experience demonstration, failing to fully explore the local professional connotations and practical value.

Symbolic interaction theory believes that symbols are the link between people, and people’s views on others can be exchanged in symbolic interaction. County-level media is a symbol generation field, providing a platform for media symbol exchange between the sender and receiver ([12]). From the perspective of the practical logic of county-level media in agricultural communication, the locality of interaction is the key to connecting content production and audience needs in the locality theory system. Its core is to create a normalized, institutionalized, and cyclical two-way communication mechanism, which is also a concrete manifestation of the participatory communication concept in the rural field ([2]). “Let’s Farm Together” relies on the “Zhangxin Changxing” client, television, WeChat public account and offline sharing sessions to initially realize the information exchange between the sender and receiver, and to a certain extent breaks through the traditional one-way communication mode of agricultural programs, laying the foundation for the construction of locality of interaction. However, from the perspective of the overall operation mechanism, the program has problems of superficial and fragmented interaction and rough collection of responses. For example, the interactive messages of farmers on the platform lack continuous professional responses, the transformation of topics and the tracking of effects are insufficient, and the interaction is merely a formality. Meanwhile, the program failed to conduct tiered research based on the differences in industries in Changxing’s towns and villages. For example, the program did not collect or respond to the different needs of rice-vegetable rotation in Hongxingqiao Town, specialty forestry and fruit in Si’an Town, and mountain planting and breeding in Huaikan Mountainous Area. This made it difficult to truly match the differentiated needs of farmers, resulting in insufficient interactive effectiveness.

Functional locality, within the framework of locality theory, refers to important dimensions of service effectiveness, industrial embedding, and social value. It emphasizes that county-level integrated media must deeply integrate into the local governance system, industrial system, and social network, becoming a functional platform for promoting rural revitalization, rather than an isolated content production institution. From this perspective, “Let’s Farm Together” has established a basic cooperative relationship with the Changxing County Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau. By showcasing new agricultural models, popularizing planting and breeding techniques, and telling farmers’ stories, it has initially played a role in serving local agricultural development and has certain practical value in disseminating a new image of Changxing agriculture and promoting green planting and breeding models. However, from the deeper requirements of functional locality, the collaboration between the program and county-level agricultural entities is still mainly phased, project-based, and temporary, and a long-term, institutionalized, and systematic collaborative mechanism has not yet been established. The program remains in a superficial cooperation model where “agricultural departments issue notices and media passively conduct interviews”. The agricultural and rural affairs bureau, media convergence center, cultural and tourism department, and youth service organizations operate in a fragmented manner, failing to deeply integrate support policies for returning youth, agricultural technology promotion, agricultural and cultural tourism project development, and promotion of agricultural entrepreneurs with the program’s dissemination. The lack of a long-term collaborative mechanism and full-process participation prevents the release of the synergistic effects of policy promotion, youth cultivation, and industrial empowerment.

To ensure that agricultural programs are accurately positioned, provide guidance for agriculture, oriented towards rural areas, and close to farmers, the core issue lies in clarifying the program’s positioning ([6]). Agricultural programs need to have both service and guidance attributes. On the one hand, they should be based on the actual agricultural production, providing learnable and applicable technical guidance and decision-making references, avoiding the superficial narrative of “emphasizing display and neglecting interpretation”; on the other hand, they should take into account the trend of urban-rural integration, break the single rural perspective, serve diverse farmer groups such as traditional farmers, family farm owners, and returning new farmers, and also meet the information needs of urban audiences for rural industries, ecology, and culture.

There are differences in production scale, technical foundation, and development needs among farmers in Changxing County. County-level media can leverage their geographical proximity to establish a targeted information docking mechanism for them, but the current program content has not fully responded to this stratified demand. New farmers pay more attention to smart agriculture and technological production, while traditional farmers rely more on practical and easy-to-operate planting and management skills. Therefore, the program should strengthen professional support, build a stable content production mechanism by uniting agricultural experts and grassroots extension workers, and launch differentiated content for different groups; closely follow the policy of cultivating returning youth, create a series of vertical agricultural science popularization content, launch fixed columns such as agricultural technology explanation and pest and disease control, and use VR/AR technology to create immersive science popularization scenarios, so as to truly make the guidance, orientation and accessibility of agricultural communication put into practice.

Rural communication is not simply the transmission of information, but a contextualized communication practice embedded in local social structures, production methods, and lifestyles. Therefore, the core value of interaction lies in accurately capturing the genuine needs of local farmers and transforming them into an intrinsic driving force for content optimization. The interactive design of agricultural programs at the county level is essentially a process of shifting media production power from a “media-centric” to an “audience-centric” approach. Changxing County has 16 townships, and their agricultural production patterns show significant regional differences: Hongxingqiao Town focuses on large-scale rice-vegetable rotation, Si’an Town focuses on specialty forestry and fruit farming and facility agriculture, and mountainous townships such as Huaikan and Baixian are mainly engaged in small-scale farming and mountain breeding. The technological, informational, and developmental needs of different regions and entities are clearly differentiated. The existing interactive model of the program lacks a localized needs collection mechanism tailored to the county’s agricultural situation and fails to conduct tiered and categorized research based on township industrial differences, making it difficult to truly respond to the differentiated needs of farmers.

To enhance the program’s local relevance, it should be grounded in Changxing’s local agricultural landscape, forming a stable, complete communication loop of “demand discovery-content response-practical feedback-optimized reproduction”. First, it should broaden its online and offline demand collection channels, retaining the message function on new media platforms while establishing fixed information networks through township agricultural technology stations, village committees, and agricultural supply stores. Second, it should establish a demand classification system, standardizing the processing of technical difficulties, policy questions, market information, and content suggestions, forming a content production model where farmers raise demands, the program team collects feedback, and agricultural experts provide answers. Third, it should establish a fixed Q&A segment and follow-up report column, providing in-depth responses to issues of high concern to farmers and incorporating solutions into subsequent program sequences, creating observable, verifiable, and scalable practical effects.

Rural communication theory points out that the core competitiveness of county-level media lies not in content output, but in its embedding ability—that is, whether it can truly take root in the local area, serve the local area, and integrate into the local industrial ecosystem. Currently, Changxing County is at a critical stage of transformation from traditional agriculture to large-scale, standardized, branded, and digitalized operations. Family farms, farmers’ professional cooperatives, returning new farmers, and local experts are developing rapidly, creating an increasingly strong demand for comprehensive services such as technical guidance, policy coordination, market information, brand building, and production-sales linkage.

Therefore, the program must be guided by top-level design, shifting from a “communicator” to a “service provider” and “organizer”, achieving deep integration of media with agricultural industries, rural governance, and youth development through institutionalized collaboration, and comprehensively enhancing the actual effectiveness of its localized functions. First, establish a long-term collaborative mechanism integrating media, culture and tourism, government affairs, and youth. Leveraging Changxing County’s support policies for returning youth, a special team will be formed, led by the Changxing County Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau, spearheaded by the integrated media center, with the cooperation of the culture and tourism department, and the participation of agricultural experts and returning youth. This team will jointly plan topics, conduct technology promotion and industry assistance, and shift the focus of programming from one-way publicity to two-way service. Second, build a comprehensive agricultural information service platform for the county. Leveraging the advantages of county-level integrated media, this platform will integrate agricultural science resources, culture and tourism resources, and youth entrepreneurship resources. A regular service column will be established on the “Zhangxin Changxing” platform, utilizing VR/AR and other digital technologies to create agricultural science popularization scenarios, reducing farmers’ information acquisition costs and addressing information asymmetry in agricultural production. Third, we will promote the extension of media empowerment to the entire industry chain, help Changxing’s characteristic agricultural products such as rice-frog symbiosis, rice-vegetable rotation, hanging melon, and rice to create regional public brands, and link agricultural entities, cultural and tourism platforms and returning youth to carry out agricultural, cultural and tourism promotion, agricultural product exhibitions and sales, and agricultural research and study activities on a regular basis, so as to upgrade from content dissemination to industry services and from single publicity to long-term empowerment.