In his seminal book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” the late Neil Postman rued a media landscape in which news was presented in ever shrinking nuggets of time.
“While brevity does not always suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does. It’s simply not possible to convey a sense of seriousness about any event if its implications are exhausted in less than one minute’s time,” he wrote.
At the time Postman was writing, the average length of a news story presented on television was 45 seconds. It would be more than three decades before TikTok was launched in the U.S., with its rapid-fire videos becoming not just a source of information and entertainment for Americans, but increasingly a source of news.
“A fifth of U.S. adults now regularly get news on TikTok, up from just 3% in 2020. In fact, during that span, no social media platform we’ve studied has experienced faster growth in news consumption,” Pew Research Center reported last month.
The growth is highest among young adults. According to Pew, 43% of adults under 30 say they regularly get news from TikTok, up from 9% in 2020. But news consumption on TikTok is rising among all Americans except those 65 and older.
People in the news industry are paying attention. Media organizations from The Washington Post to the U.K.’s Daily Mail are investing resources in TikTok. But much of the news content people are seeing on the platform is not the work of traditional news outlets, or even independent journalists, but of “content creators” who may do their own reporting or repurpose the work of others.
Are these creators meeting a need for trustworthy information or helping to drive historic levels of distrust in media? That’s a matter of debate, but several nonprofit organizations are working to help TikTok “newsfluencers” improve their skills. And while the knee-jerk reaction to Pew’s data may be to despair, there’s a wide variety of news on offer from TikTok, and some might surprise and even engage you.
Why do people go to TikTok for news?
The rapid growth of TikTok in the U.S. has occurred even despite concerns about data privacy and ownership by a Chinese company. (A deal that would transfer control of the U.S. platform to American investors, announced last month, is still pending.)
Unlike Facebook or X, TikTok was designed for smartphones and is viewed vertically. A hallmark of the platform, which debuted in the U.S. in 2018, is the brevity of the content.
While TikTok videos can be up to 10 minutes long, and longer if uploaded or livestreamed, most are much shorter. A recent Washington Post analysis about the addictiveness of TikTok showed that the most regular users of the app watched a video just shortly more than 10 seconds before moving on to another one.
It is these sorts of videos that often go viral, and give TikTok a reputation as a place to see cute videos of baby hippos or learn a popular dance move. But Robert J. Thompson, a professor at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, cautioned against seeing “TikTok news” as any one thing.
“When we were judging news on television, it was monolithic. There was a finite number of things that we could see and judge,” Thompson said.
In comparison, “When you say people are getting their news from TikTok, that can mean an infinite variety of things, and we can’t judge whether that’s good or bad; we’d have to do it on a case-by-case individual basis.”
That’s because every TikTok feed is different. “It’s not, ‘TikTok Presents the News at 7.’ They’re getting it from all over the place. And some of it is horrible, some of it is completely misinformation. And some of it is probably fine,” said Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.
Getting more of it to “fine” is the goal of a handful of initiatives which are bringing journalistic principles to news content creators, nearly 80% of whom have never worked for a news organization, according to Pew.
One such initiative is the nonprofit News Creator Corps, which is offering training to content creators that includes the basics of fact-checking, document analysis and interviewing.
News Creator Corps’ executive director Rachel Lobdell calls content creators “trusted community messengers,” saying they “share information in an age where most reporting by traditional news organizations lives behind expensive paywalls, and misinformation is available freely across platforms.”
The face-to-face nature of TikTok can feel like an intimate conversation, and the growing reach of “news influencers” plays into a changing media environment in which individuals are often trusted more than institutions.
While trust in media overall is at a historic low, trust in news from social media outlets has increased, according to polling released by YouGov earlier this year.
What does news on TikTok look like?
News Creator Corps, which declined an interview, has selected an initial class of 20 content creators who will each receive a $5,000 grant and participate in an eight-week training program that began this month.
The group includes a Florida woman who posts about the news under the name “Amanda Informed” on TikTok, a California father who shares information about raising autistic children, and a Texas attorney who shares information about politics and how government works.
“Amanda Informed” posts breaking news as well as other headlines and “News in 60 Seconds” roundups. In a 23-second post on TikTok the day that Charlie Kirk was shot in Utah, Amanda, who does not give her last name, began, “Holy (expletive), you guys: breaking news! Charlie Kirk was reportedly shot in the neck while seated during a live Q&A session.”
The video has more than 51,000 views.
Even when the delivery of the news or commentary is more or less conventional, TikTok enables — and perhaps benefits from — unconventionality in other ways. As one TikTok journalist wrote recently for the International Journalists Network, many of the videos are edited “in a way that would mortify a television editor.”
The Texas attorney in the News Creator Corps class of fellows recently delivered commentary on the gubernatorial race in that state — from what appears to be a comfortable bed.
The Washington Post’s main TikTok account, in contrast, is a bit more buttoned-up.
For example, a video explaining why President Donald Trump changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War features a woman, played by Carmella Boykin, explaining the change to a group of reporters (who are also played by Boykin). In the final scene, Boykin says she’s got to go ... and the video cuts to her holding a “Twilight” book with a bar of “Twilight” movie music in the background.
About an hour north of DC, a nonprofit news organization called the Baltimore Banner is using TikTok in a way that blends old-school, shoe-leather reporting with the informality of TikTok.
In one Banner video, two reporters show how they came across a speaker blasting the children’s song on “Baby Shark” over and over again on a city street. They then take viewers along as they make calls and send emails trying to figure out who was responsible. Eventually, the speaker and the music disappear, and the reporters conclude that it was an effort to get a homeless man from sleeping in the vicinity. Similar efforts have been taken in other cities, they say, but this was the first time that “Baby Shark” has been “weaponized” in Baltimore, they say. The video has been liked by more than 155,000 viewers.
To be clear, just because people say they get news off TikTok or YouTube, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s their only source of news. In one study of TikTok and Instagram news consumers in Belgium, some people said they might learn about something on the platforms and then seek out a traditional news outlets to learn more.
But respondents also said that they found traditional news presentation “monotonous” and “pretty boring,” and that “they take a very long time to explain things” on television news broadcasts.
“On TikTok I just know what is going on straight to the point,” one respondent said. Another said that, compared to other social media platforms, “TikTok is still more playful, faster and livelier. It needs to attract your attention immediately or people scroll away.”
What is a journalist?
Eli Kintisch, the Ted Turner professor of environmental media at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, is teaching students about how to conduct environment journalism on TikTok.
In an interview, he said that the growth of TikTok news is understandable for a generation of Americans who have largely grown up without print newspapers and broadcast TV alongside “the growth of the most addictive electronic technology ever created.”
“The demand is there, of viewers who are already on these platforms watching a ton of videos about everything, to also get the day’s news,” he said.
But Kintisch, who is also a science journalist and video producer, explained why training initiatives like those offered by News Creator Corps, Project C and The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas might be helpful: The news newsfluencers often lack “the traditional guardrails and institutional memory and facilities that make for strong journalism,” Kintisch said, and don’t have institutional enforcement of ethical practices such as correcting mistakes and disclosing conflicts of interest, such as those related to funding.
“It’s never quite clear, if you’re watching a newsfluencer, what their ultimate allegiance is,” he said. And the news influencers’ takes tend to be strongly opinionated, he added.
At the same time, at a time when there is a lot of handwringing about media, there is excitement about this new way of engaging in news — both for content creators and legacy news organizations.
“There will always be a need for reliable information,” Kintisch said. But, he added, while TikTok might not be as lucrative as, say, a popular YouTube channel, it offers something equally important: reach.
“You no longer need to get booked on the ‘Today’ show or ‘60 Minutes’ to reach a national audience,” Kintisch said.
Meanwhile, content creators on TikTok benefit from the changing definition of what it means to be a journalist in the age of the internet — at least among young Americans.
When Pew asked people “What is a journalist?” earlier this year, nearly 79% said that a person who writes for a newspaper or news website is a journalist, and 65% said a person who reports for or hosts a TV news program is one. Only 26% of respondents overall said a person who makes their own videos or posts about news on social media is a journalist.
But when broken down by age, Pew found that young adults are far less likely than older ones to care whether their news comes from someone who has traditionally been defined as a journalist. Forty-one percent of adults ages 18 to 29 say someone who posts about news on social media is a journalist, compared to just 14% of people 65 and older, Pew said.
Is TikTok the new TV?
Thompson, at Syracuse University, likens concern about the TikTokification of news to another worry a few decades ago.
“It wasn’t that long ago that we started hearing that all the young people are getting the news from late-night comedy, and everyone was just rolling over and clutching their pearls — what is the future of democracy if people are getting their news from late-night? ... My response to that was, if kids are getting the news from The Daily Show, I can think of worse places for them to get their news. The Daily Show was doing stuff — I called it ‘investigative comedy’ — that CNN should have been doing in a journalistic mode and weren’t."
As an example, Thompson said, during the lead-up to the Gulf War, The Daily Show would show clips of what political leaders were saying and then would show clips of the same leaders contradicting themselves. “They were not only doing political satire; they were becoming the watchdogs over television news. If journalists were the Fourth Estate, late-night comedy had become the Fifth Estate.”
It turned out that late-night comedy had a place in the news ecosystem, he said, as TikTok does now. Every Thursday night, Thompson records three hours of TikTok content to add to his growing collection for the course he teaches on the history of television. In a way, he said, “Social media has become what television was.”
As for the brevity of TikTok, Thompson says, “Sometimes brevity is really important. E=mc2 is brevity.”
But, he cautions that TikTok can be “a fine way to get news, but with a big qualification — as long as it’s not the only place you get news."
“If you’re only getting your news from TikTok, that would be bad, just like if you were only getting your news from Jon Stewart, that wouldn’t be good.”
And as Thompson said, there are worse ways to get news: According to a recent Pew report, about 9% of Americans say they’ve gotten news “often” or “sometimes” from an AI chatbot.