What if getting audiences – especially younger audiences – to engage with news content isn’t as hard as we think it is? What if the biggest blockers to audience engagement are some of our own journalistic traditions?

Last month, I was on a panel with Ben Reininga at the International Symposium of Online Journalism (ISOJ) and his talk – the output of his work for the past year as a Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow at Harvard – made a tight case for why social media creators are succeeding (growing audience) where legacy news is slipping (losing audience).

Reininga comes by his knowledge honestly. Prior to the Harvard fellowship, he was Global Head of News at Snapchat where he had a front-row seat to how younger audiences were interacting with content and where he started seeing a shift in consumption habits. But not the one we might assume. Reininga kept hearing that young, social-fluent audiences (aka “kids”) hate news. Not an uncommon take in the news industry.

“There was this notion that a youth focused social media platform and good serious news are, like, somehow fundamentally incompatible,” said Reininga. “I found it very pervasive … The news providers are sort of making the argument that they're making broccoli, but the kids only want candy. And that wasn't true.”

Instead, what Reininga found at Snapchat was a young audience with a “real, deep and nuanced interest in news” but not in content delivered in the same traditional formats and tones that have come to define capital J Journalism. So he wondered, what if instead of trying to change the minds and preferences of millions and millions of teens the news providers instead started producing content that more fit the characteristics of content that did resonate with them. Content that felt more approachable and maybe didn’t take itself too seriously.

Reininga and his Snapchat team started running experiments. In one, he worked with an established news show to post two versions of the same story: The first took the form of a traditional broadcast – professionally produced, shot in a studio, hosted at a desk. The second took the same story and instead had the host shoot mobile, speak unscripted and appear from a domestic space instead of a studio.

“We found a real upswell of interest in that second more platform-native product,” said Reininga.

Those early experiments informed the direction of Reininga’s work at Harvard, where he took a look at the research around two things: why people say they avoid news and what audiences find so appealing about social-first content.

While news avoidance studies were readily available, there hadn’t been as much research into the characteristics of engaging social content. Working with a small team of graduate students, Reininga pulled data from TikTok. “We'd identify various parameters to pick a set of videos,” explained Reininga. “Like the highest trafficked videos about the election for the month of October 2024 or SignalGate. Then we would pull those into a dataset and just start hand labeling – like going through and identifying sets of characteristics.”

Once they’d labeled examples of positive engagement, they looked for patterns to identify what the most effective news videos on social platforms had in common. That ultimately led to the slide that, at ISOJ, felt like the Google Presentations version of a Rosetta Stone - the code that could help anyone looking to reach younger, social-forward audiences with news content.

It was a startlingly clear roadmap: a side-by-side diagnosis of why traditional news content is avoided — and how creator-led content earns trust instead. Where the reasons for news avoidance are familiar – “too elite, complex, biased, depressing and irrelevant” – content from creators was viewed as “intimate, transparent, engaging and relatable.”

Reininga is quick to say he hasn’t solved the problem of news avoidance or created the recipe for the perfect TikTok video. But rather, hopes that the approaches creators are using to connect with audiences can inspire journalists — in more or less literal ways.

Many of the examples we talked about really kept coming back to the intimacy created by some of the most popular creators.

“You'll see folks shooting in domestic spaces. There’s a whole genre of TikTok creators who shoot in their beds or in their closets or in their cars,” said Reininga. "It's hard for people to distrust you if they can see your kitchen and your dishes in the background.”

Reininga is also interested in how creators introduce transparency into their work in ways that are often much more visible than the rigorous work that goes into traditional journalism. Tools built into platforms like Tiktok – green screen ability to show and cite sources or dual-screen function – show process in a way that takes the audience along on their reporting and fact-checking journey. Reininga cited TikTok creator @expatriarch, who used his green screen to walk viewers through court documents and video to illustrate how he landed at his conclusions about the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni lawsuit.

When it comes to being a bit more playful, Reininga mentioned one creator who walks around with a mic taped to a big yellow crowbar. Although the creator takes on big topics, like the Eric Adams corruption scandal, the visuals are homespun-y in a very DIY relatable way – truly the opposite of a polished broadcast news talking head.

@endeavorance

Feb 18 2025 | The elected politician and former cop keeps doing crimes over and over? Weird! #news #newyorkcity #newyork #stuffkeepshappening

Of course it helps when crowbar guy’s video is not a 30-minute evening news broadcast, but instead a few minutes sandwiched in between viral dances and get-ready-with-me vids (remember timepass mode?). The content resonating on these platforms is not only custom-made for the norms, but also has to blend in and stand up alongside the rest of the firehose and still draw eyeballs.

What’s next?

In the next year, it will be interesting to see whether more news organizations seriously study the success of independent creators — not as a gimmick or a one-off “social media strategy,” but as a foundational shift in how trust, relevance and relationships are built with audiences.

Some early signs are encouraging. At places like MPR News, Kaila White Roberts’ team is applying lessons from creator culture — investing in platform-native formats, treating social media as real communities (not just promotion channels) and centering storytelling that feels accessible, conversational and human.

But the temptation inside many legacy organizations is to treat this shift as superficial — to borrow the tone or aesthetic without actually rethinking the traditional top-down structures, editorial voice and detachment that audiences are increasingly rejecting.

If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that audiences still care about news — but they are choosing how they engage with it, who they trust to deliver it and where they’re willing to show up.

TL;DR: The future of journalism will belong to those who learn to speak fluently in the new language of connection.

the latest

• Substack made its name as a rebel base for independent journalists. Lately it’s looking more like legacy media’s latest tony neighborhood. This week, New York magazine started publishing to Substack, and co-founder Hamish McKenzie was in D.C. last weekend, hosting a soirée conveniently timed around the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Disruption is great — but so are hors d’oeuvres with the establishment.

• Ryan Lizza left Politico to launch, drumroll, a Substack. In a piece Politico has already asked him to take down, Lizza says Telos News will aim to do things better than his former employer and be 100 percent reader funded.

• Blaze Media, the conservative media company founded by Glenn Beck, is making a strategic shift to a creator model, per Semafor in a piece about Blaze’s move to represent Nicole Shanahan’s interview podcast.

• Michael Graff is leaving Axios to launch his own independent newsletter, The Charlotte Optimist. Graff started out with Charlotte Agenda founder Ted Williams, who later sold his newsletter to Axios. Graff went on to serve as the publisher’s Southern bureau chief and now, it seems, is going back to his roots.

• 404 Media reports that many are canceling their subscriptions as the economy continues to soften. In a piece that models the kind of transparency that continues to win audience trust, the 404 team says they remain in a strong position but are taking proactive steps to shore up their finances with a referral program, a conservative approach to growth and the help of their readers.