This paper reports a content analysis of ten mainland Chinese newspapers compared with their respective news applications. The newspapers were analysed in 2012 and 2018, and the news applications were from 2018. The paper explores the extent to which a shift from print to digital distribution has altered the practice of journalism. Contrary to the widely-held view which stresses the transformational nature of the shift, the results of this analysis show that there are more commonalities than differences between offline and online journalism. There were some changes to the printed versions between 2012 and 2018 but reports in the news applications remained in most respects close to those in the printed newspapers. There were changes in the way that news was presented, notably the use of more illustrations and emotion-driven expressions and markers. But there were no significant differences in terms of substantial dimensions of content, including the pattern of the sources used, the depth of the contexts and orientation of the reports. The use of distinctive online affordances, like hyperlinks, was found to be infrequent.