Indian political journalism has historically been shaped by spectacle-driven television debates marked by confrontation, real-time immediacy, and highly visible anchor performance. Over the past decade, however, the expansion of digital platforms has facilitated the emergence of alternative journalistic formats that prioritise explanation, contextualisation, and narrative coherence over adversarial exchange. This study examines Netanagri, a political explainer programme produced by The Lallantop (TV Today Group), as a case of format transition within India’s evolving digital news ecology. Employing qualitative format analysis alongside a systematic corpus analysis of episode titles (N = 50, July 2024–June 2025), the study deliberately foregrounds questions of structure, narrative design, and platform adaptation rather than ideological positioning or partisan critique. Episode titles, drawn from The Lallantop’s dedicated website, are analysed as editorial format artefacts, while the audio-visual architecture of the programme is examined through its YouTube-hosted episodes. Anchored in format theory, the hybrid media system framework, framing theory, and platformisation scholarship (Chadwick, 2013; Entman, 1993; van Dijck et al., 2018), the analysis demonstrates a marked shift from adversarial debate to platform-native explanatory journalism. Netanagri emerges as a hybrid format that reworks broadcast-era journalistic authority through digital affordances such as long-form pacing, retrospective narration, and attention-sensitive interface design. The study contributes to journalism studies by theorising how legacy media institutions recalibrate political meaning and journalistic authority through format innovation under conditions of intensifying platformisation.