TikTok and the "New News" Media

Traditional, local news has declined, but what's replacing it might be better.

Take a second and think about how you heard about the recent train derailment in Ohio, which has created a giant cloud of toxic chemicals and forced a mass evacuation. It’s the plot of White Noise come to life.

If you’re reading this, then odds are you first heard about the crash on Twitter. But if you’re one of the dwindling number of people who rely on local newspapers and tv station for news, then you’ll have seen stories that mostly consist of repeating official statements from the authorities.

“If you are in this red zone that is on the map, and you refuse to evacuate, you are risking death,” says PA Governor Josh Shapiro. Ohio’s Governor Mike Dewine avers, “We were in a position where we had to weigh different risks with no great choices.” If you’re lucky, maybe you also got a man on the street style interview from a resident. That’s generally the stuff of local news reporting: official statements + neighbor reaction.

Now contrast that to how I—and 1 million other people thus far—learned key details about the train derailment: a TikTok video created by an entrepreneur and industrial designer with roots in nearby Pittsburgh. In under three minutes, I learned to appreciate the drastic difference between the release of vinyl chloride and polyvinyl chloride; how the crash has released a million pounds of a substance for which the safe exposure limit is sub-*one part per million*; and how burning it off ultimately creates hydrochloric acid that’s now wafting around rural Ohio.

As an artifact of news reporting, that TikTok video provides information that is several levels of a higher order than anything you’ll find in print or on the air at the moment. Indeed, the creator even mentions how local news is just gullibly parroting whatever the company and/or government line happens to be.

I’m reminded of how when we talk about the decline of local news, it’s natural to frame the conversation around the hunt for sufficient substitutes to fill a role traditionally played by local newspapers and tv/radio stations. But maybe we shouldn’t be fixated on substitution—which implies 1 to 1 comparison—when much of what we’re seeing emerge from that vacuum is actually superior to traditional local news in a variety of ways.

Think about the purpose of local news (inasmuch as it wasn’t primarily about selling ads). The goal was to quickly gather and report local opinion and official knowledge about current events. But in a social media age with discovery-fueled platforms like TikTok (and Substack), we no longer need intermediaries to do the gathering work for us. A quarter of Generation Z relies on TikTok as a major news source; 40% use TikTok and Instagram instead of Google to search for local information.

It’s a paradigm shift that’s highly generationally stratified but which will ultimately transform every aspect of the discovery process, from sports to culture to news.

Let’s use the example of trying to find a new restaurant. Baby Boomers grew up in a world in which you found out about a hot new restaurant either via word of mouth or from the food critic in the newspaper. That information discovery process was slow and unwieldy. Maybe the newspaper critic didn’t share your palate. Maybe they just hadn’t yet gotten around to covering a restaurant you were curious about.

For Millennials, that process was partially disintermediated. Instead of relying on the newspaper food critic, you could crowdsource your discovery of new restaurants via apps like Yelp or TripAdvisor. This was a significant improvement on the old model because it allowed people to assess any restaurant and view a broader range of feedback. However, the system was still centralized and potentially manipulable by Yelp or Google, which allowed pay to play for restaurants interested in boosting their search rankings.

Generation Z is bypassing the apps altogether and opting for a nearly completely disintermediated process. Say you’re traveling; you can simply search for a food hashtag in the location you’re at and find the top trending TikTok restaurant reviews for your area. It’s quick, the information is highly personalized, and it’s point-to-point rather than being routed through (or manipulated by) an app or a newspaper.

The same thing is happening to news gathering. Sure, the “new news” coverage of the train derailment doesn’t feature a professional journalist—though it could; more on that in a future post. It’s just a local person with expert knowledge being discovered en masse via an organic, distributed process.

In the pre-digital age, that local knowledge would’ve likely been inaccessible, overlooked. But because of new news platforms like TikTok, non-professionals can become a kind of temporary, deputized reporter on local events. And the resulting product, as in this case, can actually be far superior to what was proffered by the old news media.