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News influencers are growing in popularity on TikTok as more people under 30 turn to the platform for a curated rundown of the biggest headlines.
The Big Headline: The creator economy is transforming every segment of media as people look for voices that they relate to or that feel trustworthy. Influencer-driven news-sharing could ensure that more people are engaged with current events… but heighten the risk of misinformation and bias.
Behind The Camera: Some “newsfluencers” are racking up more views on TikTok than established brands like CNN, MSNBC, and CBS.
- Creators like 22-year-old NYU student Harry Sisson, 33-year-old Joey Contino, and V Spehar of UnderTheDeskNews have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers.
- CredoIQ found that one-fifth of the top 200 politically-focused TikTok accounts this summer were news influencers, and they went viral more often than legacy newsrooms (the newsrooms did have bigger reach, though).
- And like anything that catches fire on social media, newsfluencers aren’t just sharing the news, they’re sharing their opinion about it — CredoIQ classified 80% of these personalities as partisan — only 38% of legacy media accounts were classified that way.
Closing Thoughts: Gallup found that Americans’ trust in mainstream media is at a record low — for both justified and unjustified reasons. Regardless, government officials and political candidates know that they need to court news influencers to reach the public. Creators were credentialed as official press during this year’s DNC. Similarly, the Trump campaign hosted creators at a nearby hotel during the last debate. If some of these newsfluencers’ popularity continues to rise, they could eventually be hired by the legacy newsrooms they disrupted.
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