Social media has had a profound effect on the journalism industry, now firmly focused on reaching younger audiences to increase readership numbers. The rise of social media has been heralded as a kind of messiah, a solution to narrowing the considerable age gap in who reads the news.
At first glance, the strategy seems an obvious one: young adults are on social media, and so are news outlets, therefore any produced news content must be reaching young audiences. But it’s not that simple.
TikTok is a ‘News Wasteland’
The extent to which the journalism industry has successfully used social media to encourage younger audiences to read the news is a hotly debated topic. TikTok in particular has divided global news leaders. While some, like the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire, are incredibly enthusiastic about TikTok’s potential to engage young adult viewers, others, like Nieman Lab’s Mark Coddington, have questioned the ability of news content to thrive on the app. Coddington even went so far as to call TikTok ‘a news wasteland.’ And he isn’t wrong. Research conducted for the New Media & Society journal reveals that news content has very little chance of exposure on TikTok. Sixty bots were programmed to follow major news organisations’ TikTok accounts and to only like and watch videos about the day’s headlines. The results were abysmal. Out of the 6,568 videos the bots consumed, only six featured news content. But while these figures are worrying, they certainly aren’t surprising. TikTok is renowned for its unique hodgepodge of entertainment content. From its odd ‘brainrot’ humour to its seemingly random (sometimes dangerous) trends. It’s the app young adults turn to when they’re bored and want something funny or relaxing to watch. But because TikTok primarily promotes entertaining content, perhaps its algorithm just isn’t suited to the news.
Giving the News ‘More Flavour’
There are exceptions to this rule, with a few news channels having found younger fanbases on social media. In particular, the success of the BBC’s Reliable Sauce podcast, hosted by Kirsty Grant and Jonelle Awomoyi, shows how TikTok can be used to reach young adult audiences. A few years ago, the pair came up with the idea of using TikTok to get more people to engage with the news, which they pitched to different BBC departments. Now, it is an award-winning series with the greatest number of under-35 listeners of any BBC news podcast. Grant and Awomoyi, who are both in their twenties, are the same age as their target audience and understand exactly what interests young viewers. Their tone is conversational and yet professional, giving their listeners a rundown of the week’s biggest news stories in an engaging but factual way, with special guests invited to discuss important topics. Because current affairs can be so serious, framing the news as a conversation between two friends is partly what makes Reliable Sauce so appealing to the younger generation, who have become accustomed to this kind of storytelling on apps like TikTok and Spotify.
Amarah Ennis, a former IJNet intern, discusses the benefits of journalists using TikTok to tell their stories. ‘Young people want news that’s personalised, easy to understand and convenient,’ she says. Not only is the podcast easy to digest in a country where one in six adults have ‘very poor literacy skills,’ but it also means young audiences can have an emotional connection to journalists, encouraging those who have never previously read the news to do so regularly. And with an average of 350,000 views per TikTok video, Reliable Sauce’s loyal fanbase has proven that ‘it is … lazy to say that young people don’t care about news, says Grant.
Looking Into the Future
Apart from the BBC, another organisation is using social media to reach young adult audiences — albeit on a far more extreme scale. Meet The News Movement (TNM): a news organisation whose sole aim is to use social media platforms to connect with Gen Z viewers. They take pride in bringing the news to ‘where [their] audiences are,’ and can only be found on apps like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat. Employing a horizontal storytelling method, which presents their readers with the bare facts of a story, they have been able to generate surprisingly high levels of engagement with their news content. According to TNM’s website, ‘the news industry engagement average on social media (likes, follows, completes, shares and bookmarks as a proportion of total views) is 4.7 per cent — ours averages 10 per cent,’ which shows that there is an opportunity for news content on social media to flourish.
Looking into the future, that opportunity seems to be slowly shrinking. At the start of 2024, Reuters Institute sent out a survey to over 300 of the top news leaders around the world. Almost two-thirds of respondents said they were worried about the sharp decline in referral traffic from social media sites, particularly Facebook and X. In other words, fewer social media users are clicking on suggested news posts to read the full story. Because of this, 77 per cent of Reuters Institute’s respondents said that they would focus on their own channels in the next year, rather than trying to go viral on social media.
A Duty to the Public
The journalism industry has a duty to keep the public informed about world events. But how can it do that if the news isn’t reaching an entire generation? Apps like TikTok and Instagram have become such a huge part of young adults’ lives that it seems practical for news organisations to evolve and take advantage of this.
Whether we like it or not, social media is here to stay. However, with the rise of online misinformation and a fall in social media traffic to news websites, evidence suggests that the industry will have to come up with new and innovative ways to reach young adult audiences, beyond simply having a social media presence.
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