TikTok is rapidly establishing itself as an important platform for contemporary digital journalism but explorations on its transnational journalistic usage thus far remain limited in size and scope. Hence, this explorative study adopts a digital methods approach to collect and assess 26,473 TikTok videos posted by 91 European news outlets between 2019 and 2022. Rooted conceptually in affordance and hybridity theory and methodologically in digital methods, the study theorizes digital production trends by drawing on a proposed typology of visual, hashtags, and auditory affordances. News outlets studied adhere to visual and hashtag affordances, but much less so to auditory ones.
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