Speaker: Dr Alexandra Boutopoulou, University of Sheffield, Dr. Alexandra Boutopoulou is a Digital Strategy and Communications Consultant with more than 20 years professional experience in the Media and Advertising industry.

Abstract: According to Ofcom’s 2023 annual news consumption report, TikTok was the fastest growing source of news in the UK for a second year in a row. Academic and industry research strongly indicates that especially younger audiences prefer the Chinese-owned social media platform over traditional news publishers, despite the fact that these same audiences admit that they don’t necessarily find its content credible and reliable. On the other hand, news publishers have been, until very recently, extremely reluctant vis-à-vis TikTok, taking the platform’s content to be mainly characterised by frivolous content, full of memes, and grotesque videos. Even if many aspects of newsworthy events, such as the Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement and/or the Covid-19 pandemic, were featured on TikTok among other social media platforms, it was only after the beginning of the war in Ukraine that the need for quicker video productions and on-the-spot live feeds prompted news publishers to reconsider their TikTok presence.

Indeed, since its ignition, the ‘addictive’ TikTok algorithm has been offering abundant content in the form of short and amusing videos. Within the TikTok environment, “news” was mainly created and produced by individuals who had little to do with investigative and reliable journalism, such as influencers, TikTok creators, and everyday people expressing their own views, without really caring about fact checking and/or fake news spreading. Consequently, TikTok presented traditional, experienced and long-standing Global North news publishers with a twofold challenge: First, they had to understand and navigate a totally new environment, using the equivalent of a foreign language and novel communication codes, whilst simultaneously addressing a younger demographic that often considered them ‘irrelevant’ and ‘backdated’. Second, they were also committed to distinctive ethical and institutional norms regarding good journalism that placed them at the forefront of the fight against misinformation and ‘post-truth’ which, to many, seem like vices structurally linked to digital social media.

So, how have these organisations respond to this challenge so far? To address this question, this presentation will a) briefly review the TikTok content strategy and techniques of some of the most well-known traditional news media in the UK and the US, such as the BBC, Sky News, ITV, NBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times among others and b) pinpoint some of the complications traditional newsrooms face within a controlled digital ecosystem, offering thus food for thought and discussion on a very timely topic.