Journalism and TikTok
Journalists are using social media platforms to spread their news stories further, but is Tik Tok a platform that journalists should invest their time on?
TikTok, a social media platform that was the most popular app in 2020 with a total of 850 million downloads is still growing today, according to Business Of Apps. With TikTok growing it brings the question to journalists if they should invest their time in this app and the way I see how this app is going, I feel that journalists should invest their time on this platform.
Max Foster, a CNN anchor, and correspondent based in London, decided to use TikTok because he wanted to see what kids were doing on this app, according to Poynter. After seeing how this app could be used as a journalist tool, Foster decided to make a few videos and one of the videos ended up getting a total of 2.3 million views, according to Poynter.
With this application journalists could use it to reach the younger audience. 39.5% of users on TikTok are in the ages of 10–19 and 29.5% are in the age of 20–29, according to Wallaroo. TikTok is a great place for journalists to reach their younger audience and to also be more engaged with them.
I think TikTok will be an app that will grow for journalists in the next few years because how it’s friendly to new TikTok creators. According to J Source, TikTok is an application that is powerful and helps new creators join easily, and can help people reach a brand new audience.
So far journalists have been using TikTok for news coverage as well as behind the scenes footage that gets million of viewers such as Max Foster. If this trend continues with journalists, I believe that journalism will be impacted in a positive way because of how people are so engaging on TikTok.
The only way I see this trend from falling is either a new app being made or the algorithm changing that can hurt creators view count.
If this doesn’t materialize I feel that journalism won’t be hurt from it, but will fail to reach a new audience. Not only will it fail from reaching a new audience, but it will also fail to have journalists engage with their audience which is important.
