Tuesday 26th July: No, TikTok is not the enemy of traditional journalism

July 26, 2022

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TikTok - everyone's favourite app for daft dancing videos - is being used more and more for news. Ofcom’s latest report on news consumption in the UK showed that TikTok is the fastest-growing source of news for adults, and that fact has been met with much pearl clutching from the usual suspects saying it marks 'the death of traditional journalism'.

Full disclosure, I don't use TikTok. I hate the inanity of the vast majority of the content on the platform; like Aldous Huxley, I fear the truth will be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. HOWEVER, the fact that news organisations are actively taking to the channel to reach younger audiences can only be a good thing.

Different doesn't have to mean dumbed down. I pimp out the Washington Post's TikTok guy regularly. Just take a look his stuff to see how smart TiKTok can be, then compare it with the reactionary nonsense that some of our traditional journalists bang out.

The newsletter boom is far from over. According to LiveIntent’s Industry Pulse Survey of 200 senior marketing and publishing executives, 87% of publishers and marketers actively invested in email and 94% scaled their email programs in 2021. This year will see further growth and this piece from What's New In Publishing is a great look at the reasons why.

Just because you have a newsletter and you're seeing some success, doesn't mean you couldn't be doing more. Writing on his new consultancy's blog, John Wilpers has a list of 15 ways you can make the most of your newsletter strategy. You probably know most of these already, but its useful to be reminded of the ones you've forgotten or failed to act upon.

While we're on lists of 15 things, here is a list of 15 practical things you can do to grow your podcast audience. David Tvrdon has summarised a session he gave at a Future of Digital Journalism event in Moldova. You can watch the session or read David's point-by-point summary. I love that number 12 is get a newsletter... the media snake is truly eating its own tail.

This week's podcast:

In our final episode of the season, we hear from Medium’s VP of Content Scott Lamb. Scott leads the content and creator relations teams at the platform, so we talked about Medium’s famous pivots, the importance of putting creators at the core, competing with Substack, and Ev Williams’ departure.

Tickets to the inaugural Publisher Podcast Summit are on sale! Take advantage of an exclusive pre-agenda discount code just for our newsletter subscribers: enter MVNL20 at checkout for 20% off all ticket types. We'll be releasing some speaker details over the coming weeks, so keep an eye on @mediavoicespod or @pubpodawards for more.