“Meet People Where They Are”: Legacy Media Wants a Piece of That Gen Z TikTok Mojo

In May of 2019, when a 28-year-old Washington Post video journalist named Dave Jorgenson thrust his employer to the vanguard of Gen Z media by inaugurating @washingtonpost on TikTok, he followed two other accounts from the Post’s new handle. One was @ashtonkutcher. (Impostor.) The other was @nytimes. (Also an impostor.) “It was just some kid from somewhere around the world posting really weird dances,” Jorgenson recalls. “It was this joke that we followed The New York Times, but it’s not actually The New York Times.”

As of last week, after prying “@nytimes” from the clutches of the weird dance guy, the Times really is using TikTok. “Well, well, well…” Jorgenson tweeted. He posted side-by-side screen grabs showing the Post’s 1.5 million followers and the Times’ measly 464 at the time of his tweet. “I was just poking fun, but I do view it as a gentle, friendly rivalry,” Jorgenson told me. “I was really excited they actually got on. I’m excited to see what the Times is gonna do.”  

The journalism world has an unhealthy obsession with the Times, which is to say that when the paper of record does something, it tends to feel like a moment. (Remember the hubbub that attended the Times’ Tumblr debut back in 2010? Or was it 2011? Either way, how quaint!) And so the Times’ arrival on TikTok felt, to me at least, like a moment of recognition that even our most august media institutions need to be on an app crawling with lip-synched videos and bite-size comedy bits. Says Jorgenson, who turned the Post into an unlikely TikTok OG, “It seems to me what’s happening is they’ve finally gone, ‘Okay, this is not going anywhere—TikTok is a place where a lot of people are getting their news, whether you want them to or not.’”

A variety of factors have conspired to make TikTok appealing for outlets like the Post and the Times. Publishers are still smarting from Facebook nuking the news algorithm. Twitter’s been a mess ever since Elon Musk took over. Instagram’s still sorting through its pivot to video, and anyway, it’s not as addictive as TikTok, which has proven particularly adept at sending users down any number of eyeball-frying digital rabbit holes. The other thing TikTok has going for it is that it’s growing at an insane rate. And it’s where all the young people are—26% of American adults under 30 regularly get news on TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center, compared to 10% of 30- to 49-year-olds and single-digit percentages for the age brackets over 50. On the other hand, it can be tricky to monetize TikTok if you’re not, like, some personality-driven influencer with a gazillion followers. Not to mention the ominous congressional inquiry into TikTok’s privacy and data-security practices. (Some of our more hawkish Republican lawmakers are eager to boot the Chinese-owned social media titan all the way back to Beijing.)

Still, the pros appear to outweigh the cons. A December report from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that global convulsions like COVID-19 and the Ukraine war elevated news on TikTok. At the same time, tweaks enabling longer videos and promotable live streams “have also made TikTok more attractive for news publishers looking to engage younger audiences.” The Reuters Institute study found that 77% of US news publishers are active on TikTok, “attracted by the fast-growing audience and younger demographic,” and “motivated by the desire to provide reliable news, amid fears about widespread misinformation,” but also mindful of “Chinese ownership of the platform and the potential implications for free speech”—as well as fears that “the ‘TikTok-ification of news’ risks trivialising important stories as well as undermining business models that depend on referral traffic from social networks.”

Top English-language TikTokers by follower count—which is said to be a less valuable metric than engagement—include the three American broadcast news outlets, The Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, The Daily Mail, The Sun, Sky News, and BBC News, among others, according to the study, which notes, “Under 25s, in particular, are spending more time scrolling through apps like TikTok…and are less likely to go directly to news websites or apps. Almost all the publishers we spoke to for this report recognised that they need to take their content to these audiences wherever they are.” And in the case of subscription-fueled publications, to ideally convert TikTok followers into paying customers. “We’ve done a good job developing a really large Instagram audience,” The Economist’s head of social media told the researchers, “and the aim is to replicate that on TikTok.”

Legacy news organizations have embraced TikTok with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but the momentum appears to be growing. Take BBC News, which in the course of a year went from being a TikTok skeptic to recruiting a four-person TikTok team, the job posting for which stated, “Growing the BBC News TikTok account to make it the biggest and best, both globally and in the UK, is one of News’ main priorities for 2023.” Over the past year, the Post has hired two additional full-time TikTokers to collaborate with Jorgenson, whose team is now getting its own production studio. The Los Angeles Times inaugurated a six-person TikTok (and Instagram) team last summer. And in October, outgoing Wall Street Journal editor in chief Matt Murray heralded the Journal’s TikTok debut in a memo to staff, writing, “This is the latest step to introduce the Journal to younger and more diverse audiences.” (For a full tally of media outlets on TikTok, check out this Google spreadsheet that includes close to 750 accounts from around the world, including Vanity Fair’s, which now has more than 1 million followers.)

The Journal’s TikTok, led by senior platform editor Julia Munslow (herself a Gen Z social media maestro), primarily churns out advice on careers, personal finance, and personal technology, rendered in the goofy scripted-video schtick that is TikTok’s bread and butter. One recent mega-hit, with more than 2.1 million views, was a 13-second satire of the lengths to which employees will go to subvert workplace productivity surveillance, based on one of the Journal’s signature A-Hed features. The account also spotlights CEOs (here’s Uber boss Dara Khosrowshahi blabbing away in Davos) and celebrities (like these outtakes from WSJ. magazine’s December interview with Will Ferrell), as well as breaking news (Munslow’s 20-second dispatch about Ron DeSantis’s reelection also crossed the 2 million-views mark, probably thanks to the accompanying footage of DeSantis yelling about woke this, woke that). “Right now we’re not monetized on the platform,” Munslow told me. “What we’re really focused on is introducing the Journal to that younger audience.”

The New York Times, in Times-ian fashion, seems to be taking a more highbrow approach. Steve Duenes, the editor in charge of visual journalism and multimedia (and the “hidden power” on the Times masthead, as one of his colleagues put it), pointed me to a recent TikTok showcasing a photojournalist’s dramatic trek through a perilous migrant corridor in the jungle, and to another TikTok that transformed a culture piece about the German Renaissance self-portraitist Albrecht Dürer. “Photo, video, data visualization, graphics, and how we combine those things—that’s not being done with a ton of sophistication on TikTok, and we can do it extremely well,” Duenes said. “My point is not to disparage. There’s obviously a huge range of publishers on TikTok, and a huge range in approach and tone. But for any news organization trying to combine those disciplines, I think we do it better than anyone, and I think we can apply it to TikTok effectively.” (In addition to the flagship account, the Times had previously created TikTok pages for NYT Cooking and Wirecutter, its product-reviews website. There’s also one for Kevin Roose and Casey Newton’s Hard Fork podcast.)