The TikTok election

The key hits:

• News outlets will balance between timely election coverage and TikTok’s enigmatic algorithm.
• They will also use ways to present their posts as authoritative news sources.
• They are also considering how TikTok may suppress election-related content.

Would it shock you to hear that TikTok will play a major part in news organizations’ U.S. Election Day coverage next Tuesday? It shouldn’t.

“This is the TikTok election,” said Christina Capatides, vp of social media and trending content at CBS News. “In 2022, you would be remiss as a news organization to not acknowledge the enormous potential for reach and audience acquisition that TikTok brings to the table. I mean, we see view counts on TikTok that are really, really extraordinary for news. In the prime of Facebook we were seeing these sorts of views, but it’s actually even bigger than that. It’s a major component of our election coverage.”

However, for as much opportunity as TikTok offers for news outlets to reach millions of people, it presents them with some unique challenges.

For starters, the platform may spark trends but is not necessarily real-time like Twitter, so time-sensitive posts risk becoming outdated by the time they’re viewed. Additionally, the platform’s user-generated aesthetic may mask authoritative sources of information. And then there’s the concern of overly aggressive content moderation efforts suppressing news outlets’ posts.

Not that any of that is stopping news organizations — including ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, The Washington Post and Vice News — from prepping big Election Day pushes on the platform.

“We’re probably looking at somewhere between three to four times the amount of posts that we would normally post on a typical day [on TikTok],” said Catherine Kim, svp of global digital news at NBC News and MSNBC. The outlet typically posts three to four videos per day, according to Devan Joseph, executive producer of original social video at NBC News.

How newsrooms are tackling TikTok

Despite TikTok’s complexities, there’s that potential to reach a large audience that has news organizations marshaling their resources to cover the ins and outs of this year’s midterm elections on the platform.

“Just about everyone’s involved in some way. The reporter going out in the field is involved; they’re writing the script; they’re often appearing on camera. We have social producers who are very good at cutting together short-form video shot on phones. And then it’s all the way up to me thinking about what’s the TikTok story here and how that fits in with the overall package of what we’re producing,” said Michael Learmonth, editor-in-chief of Vice News.

Vice plans to enlist video editors from across its organization who normally work on shows like “Vice News Tonight” and have them help put together TikTok videos.

The Washington Post’s TikTok output will be the responsibility of its core three-person team, but the team …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron