Larry Wilson: Legacy news vs. the TikToks: a new world
A person, or perhaps a person of a certain age, can be forgiven for thinking that her or his job is to do the work, do it well, hit deadlines. Shouting to the rooftops about it, mounting it on all available platforms? That’s for the corporate comms department, right?
If you are a journalist, the answer in 2024 would be instead “wrong.” In an age of dwindling readership, viewership, listenership, part of your job after you write and edit stories is to social them out: to X, to Threads, to Bluesky, to, heaven help us, Facebook.
Beyond the extra work of marketing yourself and your media organization, this creates problems of its own. Since we don’t want to go out of business even faster than we already are, newspapers quite rightly set up what are disparagingly called pay walls — asking readers to fork over some money, as they have done for hundreds of years, in order to read the news.
So I can Instagram out my columns till the cows come home, but, after a few free ones, you’ll have to pay the price.
Turns out a lot of younger journalists are synopsizing their stories on social media as well as sending out the link, because they want to be read, not to create a financial decision for their potential readers. Their publishers are obviously of two minds about that.
I learned this and a lot of other interesting facts by tuning into a webinar last week sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, themed New Frontiers of Local News: “the shift away from traditional news sources to social media and the implications of segmenting audiences.”
Elise Labott, the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at CFR — I like that title! — was joined by Bobby Allyn, NPR’s technology correspondent, and Carla Anne Robbins, former deputy editorial page editor at The New York Times.
Robbins: Pew “asked people what are their preferred sources for news in 2024. And they said about a quarter of US adults, 23%, say they prefer news websites or apps as their sources of news; 18% said they prefer social media, but the trajectory is always very important … that’s up six percentage points since 2023. So if we’re going to start being calm about the notion that news websites are leading, they’re not leading for long.”
The age of the respondents, of course, made a huge difference in the way Americans answered: “71% of U.S. adults aged 18 to 29 get their news about local government and politics from social media compared with 36% of those 65 and older.”
This has real consequences. Especially because our government is literally trying to put out of business an app that is a major source of news and not just dance videos for a huge number of young Americans: “52% of TikTok users say they get news there,” Robbins said, “and that’s up from 43% just in 2023 and 22% in 2020. So increasingly people are turning to TikTok for news. I don’t know if you find that comforting or not. I don’t find it especially comforting.”
I don’t find it comforting at all, because I am in the paranoid camp of those who would never consider a TikTok account, as I am not partial to being spied on by Beijing even more than I already am.
Responding to competing with an app primarily aimed at entertainment, Allyn said: “I think increasingly young people find the most authentic way to consume news is through a content creator they already have a relationship with and trust over a legacy media organization, most of which are full of reporters who have been professionally trained to not put their personality first.”
But that’s precisely why Allyn says that after he files a story he does put it up on TikTok — ‘cause that’s where the audience is.
“I really, really have been pushing my colleagues to just go and do a direct-to-camera two-minute explanation of breaking news when you have it, because you just never know it might go viral. And if you don’t do it, somebody else will.”
News: you snooze, you lose.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.