The rising power of crudely-made news media
text by Ivar Laanen; image by Redouan Masrati
“Perhaps a long message made quickly is better than a short message made slowly.”
As 2021 came to a close, so did Google’s 15-year reign as the most popular website domain in the world. That honor now belongs to TikTok, the video-sharing app that has surpassed all social platforms in terms of Internet traffic and search engine results. It’s also the fastest growing news source amongst adults in the UK–and likely beyond.
Where TikTok has seen a sharp spike in news consumption over the past couple years, Youtube continues to grow as a go-to platform for news. Pew reports 26% of American adults regularly visit Youtube for their news fix, with half doing so to access “alternative views” from independent journalists. Meanwhile podcasting, already an important news source in the US, saw explosive growth in Europe thanks to greater availability of local-language content. As these different mediums ascend in popularity, we’re also seeing it become increasingly common for people to get paid subscriptions to their favorite independent journalists and podcasters.
These trends in alternative media stand in blatant contrast to what we’re seeing in the traditional news media landscape. By 2025, the US is on pace to lose one-third of the daily papers that existed roughly two decades ago; for the remaining papers, staff cuts and canceled print days are becoming routine. As for Cable News and its longtime stranglehold on American eyes, viewership took a tailspin across all major networks in 2021. Fox News saw a staggering 34.6% drop in viewership. CNN’s numbers plummeted by 40.5%. In just five years, over a quarter of US households gave up their TV subscription; less than half of US households can still access cable TV–let alone watch the news.
TikTok and Youtube rising, TV and print dying: what to make of this?
What does it say about our society that more and more people would rather get news from amateur creators on TikTok than through official news sources? And does this spell the end for traditional media?
The work of Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan can lend us a hand in answering these questions.
In 1964, McLuhan wrote that the medium which we communicate through holds just as much importance, if not, more importance than the actual message itself. While we tend to focus on content, what we fail to recognize is the subtle yet powerful ways a medium shapes our perception of content and the conclusions we pull from it.
For McLuhan, the medium is not neutral. Instead, the medium is the message. What’s really driving societal change in McLuhan’s eyes is advancements in communication technology–and not what is being communicated.
Reading McLuhan’s work, we realize that pinpointing what the proliferation of all these alternative news sources means for our society requires analyzing the actual mediums that these sources communicate through. McLuhan wouldn’t live to see the Internet turn the world into “The Global Village” as he had predicted in the 60s, but if McLuhan were around, he would have a field day analyzing all the different mediums we consume news in 2022.
Today people get information through doge memes. We watch people like Toni Nagy deliver heavy political analysis while doing interpretive dance on TikTok. We subscribe to niche news forums on Telegram. We listen to 4-hour long unedited podcasts. We eat up meme-like news reports from independent journalists on Youtube. These mediums, though all different, have something in common: they allow content to be produced and published by anyone with technology available to everyone. And more often than not (except maybe podcasts), the content on these mediums is crudely-made, an intentional stylism with anti-establishment flavor.
Both on the creator side and the consumer side, engaging with these DIY mediums is a message in itself. That message is that we’ve lost trust in the official gatekeepers that have long served us our news. Looking at cable news, we know the medium implies a heavy role of the editor whose task is to cut up and frame the information we receive in order for the desired message to be delivered within the set amount of time that the medium allows for (between ads and other programs, there’s only so much time a news program has). That means that even if a report on cable news has no dubious agenda, the medium itself does not allow the viewer to see that on their own.
This is problematic in the era of “fake news,” and helps to explain why millions of people would rather listen to 5 hours of unedited audio on a Joe Rogan podcast or watch Youtube’s most popular gonzo journalist Andrew Callaghan keep the camera rolling endlessly during an interview, even when the interviewee seems to have nothing left to say: in both cases, the mediums allow for this. In both cases, the consumer can decide for themselves that there’s no editor tampering with the information they’re receiving. They decide their own “truth.”
TikTok as a medium is particularly fascinating to break down. On TikTok, videos are shot and viewed vertically. That means everything on TikTok happens through your phone, the physical parameters of the phone implying that you’ll likely watch TikTok videos alone. Perhaps this also helps us understand the type of content that rolls out of TikTok, content that might get ridiculed in a group setting but is somehow tolerable by yourself.
There’s also a cap on how long videos can be, though that has been ever-increasing from the original 15-second limit to a 10-minute maximum. However, the TikTok algorithm is said to favor short videos (for those quick dopamine hits), so there’s an incentive to keep videos short. Additionally, the medium places massive emphasis on the musical element of videos, implying a performative element to TikTok content. Originally created as an app for sharing short lip-sync videos, the app offers creators an endless range of easy-to-use tools, songs, audio samples, and other premade video formats to create audiovisual content with. The simple usability of these creative tools is key here: it nudges users to put out videos quickly and often, feeding TikTok’s high-octane algorithm that can always summon a new video for its users.
The way TikTok is being used–particularly amongst the youth–is also very telling of our world’s morphing relationship with information and how its timeliness affects its truth. Whereas you would typically just use the Google search engine to find good restaurants in, let’s say, Amsterdam’s De Pijp neighborhood, today it’s becoming common to search for that in TikTok where you might just find a video from an influencer posted 30 minutes ago in a new fusion restaurant and “oh look, the waiter’s hot and the cocktails are big…let’s go there.”
Here we learn 2 things from the use of TikTok for this function:
Why search on Google when you know that paid search results and possible fake reviews are gatekeeping and ultimately skewing the selection of restaurants you see (much like the way editors decide what you see at major news outlets)? Why not search on TikTok where your search is answered by audiovisual feedback that allows you to see for yourself whether a restaurant is for you?
Content can only be trusted if it’s new; if the video from the restaurant was published weeks ago, you probably won’t feel as confident to find the hot waiter at work.
On TikTok, short-form videos that no one would have dared post on Instagram thrive. Production quality and editing is minimal. Spontaneity is applauded. Flawlessness isn’t desirable and quickly-made content is king. It’s a medium where raw content prevails over carefully-edited productions, a medium that inherently rejects traditional media’s formalities and social media’s thirst for perfection. And whereas TikTok was once Gen Z territory, today all kinds of people and organizations are consuming and producing content on TikTok–including traditional outlets like The Washington Post.
Thus, the explosive popularity of this medium tells us–regardless of the actual content- that society is becoming wary of the formalness of traditional media as it implies a distinct separation from our own everydayness. We don’t want our news served to us anymore through the TV by a well-kept anchorman behind a sleek studio desk because we don’t relate to them. No, we want information presented through our phones from a human being that more resembles our (imperfect) selves. And on TikTok, the algorithm will always make sure to give you content from creators that cater more to your ‘truth.’
Outside the realms of journalism, there’s something marketeers could learn from the success of quickly-made content on TikTok. There’s a trope that exists in marketing that every piece of content must be as short as possible because “you know, the audience has such a short attention span.” There’s some truth to that, but just because an advert is meant to be short, doesn’t mean advertisers make short content quickly.
We know very well how a 20-second advert can turn into a game of PR Tetris to see how much information can be stuffed into the blink of an eye, requiring days upon days and endless feedback rounds–not to mention budget. What we’re saying is: perhaps this is a fool’s errand. Perhaps all the time and energy put into a short piece of content only works to erode the content of its original, genuine feel. Perhaps, in today’s world, a short message made quickly is better than a short message made slowly.
The end of traditional news media?
As the appetite grows for news content on TikTok, YouTube, and other new mediums, are we seeing the end of traditional news media?
Not quite.
While we don’t think the appetite for traditional news outlets will go away entirely, we do believe that in order to stay relevant to a wider audience, outlets must consider the weight of the medium they communicate through. If the medium inherently implies that the editor has an oversized role in framing every bit of information presented, perhaps it’s time to consider alternative mediums that allow content to be presented in a “what you see is what you get” type of way. Or...just make content a whole lot faster.
Regardless, there's one thing all content makers alike cannot ignore: the medium will inadvertently be a part of the message, no matter what's being communicated.
*ends article wondering how the blog medium affected the message…