Study Shows People Now Prefer TikTok to Access News, Rather than Traditional Media

Celebrities and influencers are now increasingly taking over for journalists as the people's source for news. Reports found that the younger generation now prefers social media applications like TikTok as a new channel for their main source of news, rather than traditional media.

TikTok as News Access

Younger generations now prefer to access news through social media rather than reading the newspapers, watching the news on the television, or listening to radio reports. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in its annual Digital News Report, audiences are now paying more attention to celebrities, influencers, and personalities on internet platforms.

55% of TikTok and Snpahcta users get their news from personalities on the internet while 52% from Instagram. Meanwhile, 33-42% of the survey get it from mainstream media and traditional journalists on the mentioned platforms, which are the most popular social media applications among the younger generation.

Despite journalists leading conversations around news on Twitter and Facebook, they struggle to get the attention of much newer platforms. TikTok is the fastest-growing social network in the report, which is used by 20% of 18-24-year-olds. This study was funded by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which is the company's philanthropic arm.

Potential Reasons

Younger audiences gain little interest in many conventional news offers as it tends toward older generations' habits, interests, and values. Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Nielsen stated, "There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older."

The results were based on interviews from the conducted study, containing 94,000 people across 46 countries conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This institution is part of the University of Oxford in Britain.

Irish News reported that the study highlighted important people that contributed journalism on TikTok, including Britain's Matt Welland who discusses current affairs and daily life on his TikTok account which contains 2.8 million subscribers.

Lead Report Author Nic Newman stated that websites are now more optimized for those that are engaged with every twist on today's news. However, these approaches also seem to be turning large sections of the public away, potentially having long-term implications for civic and democratic engagement.

TikTok has been met with incredulity and worries about the death of traditional journalism. But rather than seeing it as a threat, The Guardian reported that we should see it as a natural evolution as news finds its best possible way to find its right channel, knowing that journalism has been presented to the media as always being transformative.