To meet this need, journalists from newsrooms around the world are trying out new formats. Their goal is in particular to speak to a wider audience and combat misinformation, recalls a report from the Reuters Institute . By Victor Lepoutre, Innovation Department How do the media cover news on TikTok? This is the question that the Reuters Institute tried to answer in its Digital News Report 2022, published on December 8. Today, nearly half of the media (49%) regularly publish on this application launched by the Chinese company ByteDance in 2018.
For their part, TikTok users are always more numerous. Boosted by the Covid crisis and successive lockdowns, the platform reached more than a billion monthly active users in September 2021 according to its own figures. This is 45% more than the previous year. Young people from GenZ are the biggest fans of this social network born with the aim of promoting entertaining videos, created by its users. According to the Reuters Institute report, 40% of 18-24 year olds use the application regularly… and today 15% of them connect to TikTok in order to get information .
The same trend among 25-34 year olds, 30% of them facebook data go there regularly and 10% use it to keep up to date with the news. When the news comes to TikTok In recent years, major societal and geopolitical events such as Black Lives Matters, the covid crisis or more recently the war in Ukraine have brought the news to TikTok. Similarly, the social network has evolved and now allows longer and live videos to be broadcast. A godsend for SkyNews , which broadcast Queen Elizabeth II's funeral live in September and obtained 16 million views , thus propelling TikTok to the rank of the channel's top digital platforms , on a par with YouTube.
Other media, such as the German public channel ARD , have chosen TikTok to " transform their brand with a younger audience and inform society as a whole ," as Patrick Weinhold, the social media manager for the Tagesschau program , the channel's television news, recalls. To meet the platform's codes, Patrick Weinhold has chosen to mix information and entertainment. For example, he offers content allowing TikTok users to discover the behind-the-scenes of the editorial staff. “ Our branding comes from a traditional, studio-based television setting.