‘Normal news is boring’: How young adults encounter and experience news on Instagram and TikTok

Abstract

Instagram and TikTok constitute the fastest rising social media apps for news consumption. However, very little remains known on how young people encounter and experience news content on these platforms. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with young adult Belgians, including operationalising the walkthrough method, this qualitative research article fills this existing gap in scholarship. I contextualise but also nuance how younger users are accustomed to relying on third-party social media apps as the primary location to encounter news rather than news outlets’ own offline and online platforms. The study results also shine light on intriguing perception differences in young adults’ varying news expectations of Instagram and TikTok, based on which ramifications and recommendations are discussed. Conceptually, I propose adopting the terms encountering and experiencing news rather than being exposed to or trusting it, in order to highlight the acknowledged (radical) audience turn in journalism studies and practice.

Introduction

Upon becoming publicly available in 2006, Facebook and Twitter rapidly gained societal and academic attention for their effects on news production, diffusion and content (Lewis and Molyneux, 2018). A side-effect was the emergence of the ‘social media editor’, a newsroom worker tasked with ‘selling’ online news content (Opgenhaffen & Hendrickx, 2023; Lischka, 2021). The popularity of platforms’ personalised timelines fostered the notion of ‘incidental’ exposure to digital news content (Fletcher and Nielsen, 2018). Just a few years ago, these were heralded as dramatic changemakers in how citizens encounter and experience news.

Since then, the dynamic social media landscape has evolved considerably. The Digital News Report 2023 denoted Instagram and TikTok as the fastest rising social media platforms for news consumption worldwide (Newman et al., 2023) and found that social media surpassed direct access to news websites or apps as the main way of encountering news online (Newman et al., 2023: 11). This coalesced in an avalanche of media outlets seeking to establish a strong presence on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, only heightening news organisations’ dependency on these younger (skewing) social media platforms. This novel news ecosystem, that operates entirely within third-party social media platforms and thus independently from traditional news carriers owned by the outlets and their overarching corporations (e.g. newspapers, broadcasts or websites/apps), has previously been referred to as social (media) journalism (Hendrickx, 2021; 2023).

The currently still rather narrow body of scholarly research on the relationship between news and audio-visual platforms such as TikTok and Instagram has mostly taken the perspective of newsroom workers and news content through ethnography and content analyses (Hendrickx & Vásquez-Herrero, 2024; Hase et al., 2023; Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2022). As the allocation of resources to produce and distribute news content native to said platforms is overtly intended to gain more brand awareness among notably younger users (Newman, 2022), it is surprising that very little remains known about how the intended target audience encounters and experiences news on these platforms. In this qualitative audience study, I seek to fill this existing gap in scholarship.

Encountering news in the digital era

The places and modes in which ordinary citizens encounter news have altered dramatically in just a few decades. News content, initially solely produced by professional journalists as traditional gatekeepers, was only available in easily recognisable ‘packages’ such as print newspapers and magazines published regularly, followed by radio and television news broadcasts at fixed times (Steensen and Westlund, 2020). This started shifting with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle in the 1980s and online news in the 1990s, culminating in two things. First, the now contemporary gradual removal of the formats and platforms to which journalism was intricately connected for up to centuries. Second, a heightened dominance of third-party platforms for the production, diffusion and consumption of increasingly hybrid forms of news content stemming from a myriad of possible sources (Harcup, 2023). Ekström and Westlund (2019) have referred to this as the ‘dislocation’ of news as a commodity from once commonly shared normative understandings of journalism and their respective platforms.

Scholarship has grappled with this issue by theorising a number of key ‘turns’ in journalism and wider communication research which are all closely linked to how users’ encounters with news shift in the digital era. First, the spatial turn exists in terms of the metaphors researchers use to describe media and journalism (Reese, 2016) and entails three major factors that it facilitates in production processes: space, speed and convenience (Peters, 2012). In the ever-accelerating pace of the information age where news breaks on social media platforms, news is increasingly consumed instantly in mobile spaces (Mirbabaie and Marx, 2020). As a commodity, news needs to be available in whatever way is most convenient for the individual user, such as posts and Stories on Instagram or explainer videos on TikTok (Hendrickx, 2023; Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2019).

The second recently acknowledged ‘turn’ is the emotional turn (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020). The author argues that portraying emotion either in the production or the actual content of journalism was for a long time ‘often seen as a threat to the standards and normative ideals of journalism’ (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020: 176). Next to a rise in attention for the emotional labour journalistic production entails, the aforementioned technological changes which facilitate audiences to participate in more steps of the news process have fostered a new space for journalism that is simultaneously more digital and emotional (Beckett and Deuze, 2016). Other studies indicated how news users tend to challenge normative, distanced journalism and actively look for alternative types of news content that is more emotionally engaging (Costera Meijer, 2013). Social media users’ engagement on social media has fuelled a slate of research eager to gauge their emotions through, for instance, Facebook’s multi-level choices of reacting to news by analysing different ‘like’ options to status updates featuring news (Hendrickx et al., 2023; Hiaeshutter-Rice and Weeks, 2021).

Tying the above together is the audience ‘turn’. In her both personal and analytical essay, Costera Meijer (2020) maps evolutions in Dutch 21st-century journalism to critically reflect on efforts to effectuate this turn, appropriately marking said evolutions as ‘from paying attention to audiences as problematic for journalism’s role in democracy to reckoning with audiences as fundamental to keeping journalism alive as constructive force in democracy’ (p. 2330). Similarly, the author notes how the relationship of journalists with their audiences has shifted from ‘keeping them at a distance to constantly monitoring their movements’ (Costera Meijer, 2020: 2326). See, for instance, aggregated user analytics constantly displayed on giant screens, a move which was met with resistance and scepticism but has become commonplace in virtually every contemporary newsroom (Hendrickx et al., 2021; Nelson, 2021). In addition, scholarship has called for a ‘radical audience turn’ which means ‘shifting the focus from what news use is toward what is experienced as “informative”’ (Swart et al., 2022: 13; italics retained from original text). Here, the authors draw attention to the fact that ‘when and how people experience journalism as valuable in and for their daily lives, what this appreciation means and how it affects and impacts users remains understudied’ (Swart et al., 2022) and, in line with Ekström and Westlund (2019), call for journalism scholars to adopt a less media- and news-centric focus in their research. Related to this is the rise of audience agency, a crucial concept in the ‘audience turn’ discussion that was recently defined as ‘the capability of individuals, organised groups, and collective audiences to carry out actions and exert power, deliberately and/or incidentally’ (Hendrickx, 2022, p. 1367). Of course, encounters can be as incidental as exposures; algorithms and designed serendipity play vital roles in steering both (Smets, 2022). Nonetheless, if scholarship wishes to advance the (radical) audience turn and prioritise the experiences of active users, terminology will have to follow suit. From this vantage point, I propose adopting encountering news whereby active, agentic audiences are highlighted. This is juxtaposed with other, longer standing demarcations as audiences being exposed to news, in a more passive sense (Fletcher and Nielsen, 2018).

The notion of social (media) journalism, and subsequently this study, fits the bill of all three turns in journalism. The spatial turn contextualises social media platforms constituting new spaces for news content, production, and consumption. As highlighted by Hase et al. (2023), ‘both news websites and social media platforms offer for audiences to consume news in (audio-)visual format—but some platforms, especially Instagram and TikTok, revolve more strongly around such’ (p. 1501). From the understanding that these two platforms are unique with their overt audio-visual focus, penetration levels among young audiences as well as algorithms steering consumption (Hendrickx & Vásquez-Herrero, 2024; De Marez et al., 2024; Hagar and Diakopoulos, 2023), they warrant additional scholarly consideration. The emotional and (radical) audience turns stress heightened attention for how people experience news. It makes sense of the ‘newsness’ of news content (see next section) and puts an elevated focus on emotions and more affective content that prioritises audiences by engaging with them directly on ‘their’ platforms. This is again something particularly unique for Instagram and TikTok, where news outlets engage in brand-building activities, including ‘the presentation of visually centred content news audiences can consume in a more passive way—building journalistic brands but rarely transferring audiences to substantial information on outlets’ websites’ (Hase et al., 2023: 1503).

Although scholarship argues that news production by journalists and news consumption by citizens both continue to be marked by the power of habits and rituals (Steensen and Westlund, 2020), a growing stack of national and international reports continue to highlight how younger audiences’ news encountering and experiencing habits differ drastically from those of their older peers. For instance, the 2023 News Consumption report by Ofcom (2023) indicated that among young adults, 83% consume news online as opposed to just 47% through broadcast television as one in ten 12- to 15-year-olds named TikTok as their main source of news. This and similar reports (e.g. De Marez et al., 2024) bring essential quantitative data that indicate the disruption in news encountering and experiencing. What remains less prevalent, however, is a more qualitative approach that digs deeper into how these changes manifest in practice, where they stem from and where they can potentially head towards (but see Anter and Kümpel, 2023; Swart and Broersma, 2023). Based on the above, the first research question is as follows: How do young adults encounter news on Instagram and TikTok?

Experiencing news in the digital era

Scholarship and relevant reports establish a causal relationship between news trust and news use. Theorisations of concepts such as news avoidance list the necessity of increasing credibility and trust among the main recipes for success in bucking the negative trend (Skovsgaard and Andersen, 2020). But as the authors themselves make clear, this mainly applies for intentional news avoidance, whereas its counterpart ‘is based on an individual’s relative preference for news vis-à-vis other media content’ (Skovsgaard and Andersen, 2020: 465). This can again be linked to the spatial and audience turns and the dislocation of news and journalism discussed earlier: as the salience of news content gradually decreases along with its own designated platforms and consumption habits, it becomes easier to engage more with other types of content within the same (social media) platforms.

A significant, positive relationship between news credibility and consumption was established in the survey of South Korean citizens by Nelson and Kim (2021). However, the authors also describe how news loyalty is not transferable across platforms, noting that ‘[r]espondents who report more trust in television news, for example, are significantly less likely to consume news from newspapers’ (Nelson and Kim, 2021: 349). In the other way around, though, a negative spillover effect was laid bare in the study of Karlsen and Aalberg (2023). Their Norwegian-based study found that citizens trust news content less when they first encounter it on Facebook, but also that ‘social media news sharing can contribute to the long-term decrease in trust in news’ (Karlsen and Aalberg, 2023: 144).

News avoidance and misinformation make for salient topics in contemporary journalistic debates and are frequently ascribed to drops in news trust, credibility, and use. Following the previously examined emotional and audience turns in journalism, academia is slowly turning towards accentuating the experiences of individual media users in the digital era. The question of how people experience news viscerally and affectively remains understudied (Lewis, 2020). I position the heightened interest in this more fine-grained qualitative research approach, focusing on the experiences of groups of individuals, as a countermovement of sorts against the dominance of quantitative big data studies featuring aggregated user engagement information that, occasionally erroneously, make statements about the motives and methods of individuals’ news and other media content consumption behaviour (Hendrickx, 2022; Nelson, 2021). This is not intended to pit these research cultures against one another; rather, I hold the view that for studying changes in everyday news encounters and experiences, both are highly complementary and can help tremendously in contextualising each other’s findings.

The focus on news experiences rather than uses in this article is influenced by Changing News Use, Unchanged News Experiences? the 2021 book written by Dutch journalism scholars Irene Costera Meijer and Tim Groot Kormelink (2021), and their notion that news use ‘does not exist independently of its experience, and to make sense of experience, context and language matter’ (p. 2). In their impressive methodological framework, combining various research methods and encompassing 15 years’ worth of audience research, the authors find that

while the media landscape may indeed be ever changing and people’s practices are diversifying, insights based on a continuous stream of audience research illustrate that the way news functions in people’s lives and how they experience it, including their needs and pleasures, are more stable than is often assumed. (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2021: 3; italics retained from original text)

In his field study of Chinese-Canadian citizens, Xia (2023) assessed how they temporally make meaning of the news they consume. Following this novel take on how people experience news, the author proposes a typology of four recurring processes (gathering, threading, weaving and fitting) and notes the relevance of their thickness, ‘the number of distinct news events implicated during the process’ of meaning-making, and length, or ‘how far-reaching—to the past or the future in autobiographical time—the memories and projections being implicated are’ (Xia, 2023: 13). Such sensemaking processes overlap with how people experience news across emotional, cognitive, embodied, practical, spatial, social, linguistic and temporal levels. For the sake of clarity and demarcation of this study’s contribution, its foci predominantly lie on the cognitive (what is news and what do young users perceive as such?) and spatial (what is news on Instagram and TikTok and what are differences between both platforms?) levels.

Going back to the various studies of Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, it is worth noting that they spanned the 2004–2020 timeframe. They occasionally hinted at the increasing prevalence of social media platforms for news experiences, but for obvious reasons failed to incorporate the rapid acceleration of social (media) journalism specifically produced within and/or intended for consumption solely within apps such as Instagram and TikTok. Hence, I position this article as a modest, yet novel continuation of the existing and rapidly expanding scholarly work on news experiences, intended to serve as a stepping-stone towards additional follow-up research. For instance, recent works have assessed the experiences of Dutch and German young adults with news on Instagram. They highlighted the tensions between normative understandings of news and respondents’ personal, affective perception of it (Swart and Broersma, 2023) while also finding that Instagram ‘is an integral part of young adults’ information repertoires, although information is usually not actively sought’ (Anter and Kümpel, 2023: 1). Expanding this existing, and rapidly developing, framework of focusing on users’ individual experiences on social media related to news to also incorporate TikTok, the overt, ultimate aim of this study is to shift the focus of studying individuals’ everyday news experiences to those increasingly occurring within the two currently fastest rising social media platforms. From this understanding, the second research question is as follows: How do young adults experience news on Instagram and TikTok?

Study method

In the first half of 2023, a total of 25 young Belgian adults aged 18–24 were interviewed by two student researchers, under close supervision of the author who helped with analysing the findings. The interviews were semi-structured and made up of two parts: the walkthrough method and the actual interviews (in line with Swart and Broersma, 2023). The walkthrough method was used ‘to systematically and forensically step through the various stages of app registration and entry, everyday use and discontinuation of use’ (Light et al., 2018: 881). More recently, Duguay and Gold-Apel (2023) expressed their view that TikTok’s ‘data flows, algorithmic processes, users, and personalised functionalities’ (p. 8) are difficult to fully capture solely using the walkthrough method. With this critique in mind, the walkthrough method was complemented with extensive, in-depth interviews.

The respondents first spent 1 minute scrolling through their Instagram and TikTok feeds while telling the researchers what they saw in a think-aloud exercise. Respondents were asked to specifically note if they saw news content appear in their timelines and if so, how they experienced and engaged with it. Adhering to the dislocation of journalism and news paradigm, the interviewers gave respondents complete freedom to gauge which content they classified as news. They asked about the news content they saw (what kind of news the respondents thought it was, why they considered it news, its source and how it made them feel). Next, the respondents’ individual experiences and remarks were used as conversation starters for the semi-structured interviews. For these, an exhaustive topic list had been assembled prior to the interviews featuring the following three main components: social media use in general (to make sure that respondents actively used Instagram and/or TikTok), news consumption in general (to make sure that respondents consume news one way or another) and ultimately news consumption on Instagram and TikTok specifically. The topic list, along with set questions, is added as an Appendix 1 to this article.

Respondents were recruited using snowball sampling, whereby the student researchers gathered in their own networks ‘a small number of initial contacts [. . .] who fit the research criteria and [were] invited to become participants within the research’ (Parker et al., 2019: 3). They were asked to recommend other peers in their own networks who could be other potential respondents that fit the criteria, with this process repeated until a natural saturation point was reached (Mortelmans, 2016). It was predefined that respondents had to be Dutch-speaking (Flemish) Belgians aged 18–24 who all indicated frequently spending time on either Instagram and/or TikTok. The language demarcation is in line with the researchers’ mother tongue (Dutch, French and German are all Belgian national languages). The frequency of using social media apps was demarcated using the Digimeter report by researchers of Ghent University, which studies media consumption in Flanders and in its most recent edition indicated that using Instagram for more than 15 minutes and TikTok for over an hour per day constitute frequent users (De Marez et al., 2024). The majority of overall respondents identified as female (n = 17) and the eight others as male, with one respondent at the time still in secondary school, 15 studying at colleges or universities and nine already having entered the workforce.

All but one interview were carried out remotely over various video chat applications. These ranged from WhatsApp video to FaceTime and Microsoft Teams; respondents could choose the platform they felt most accustomed with. The two student researchers divided the respondents and carried out all interviews individually, but transcribed and coded each other’s interviews using MAXQDA, closely coordinated by the author. This approach involved open, axial and selective coding (Williams and Moser, 2019) and enabled a fine-grained awareness of all 25 interviews, which greatly facilitated the depth and rigour of the coding process. Through a series of in-depth analytical discussions between the author and the two student interviewers and building on the insights derived from the raw interview transcriptions and the coding process, a total of six main codes were established using grounded theory (the walkthrough method, overall media experiences, overall news experiences, news experiences on Instagram and TikTok, news experiences through traditional media and open-ended questions, which for instance included inquiring respondents about their viewpoints on the future of news experiences and news avoidance). Respondents’ quotes are used by indicating their initials.

Study results

Encountering news

During the walkthrough method, the respondents scrolled through their own Instagram and TikTok feed for 1 minute and subsequently told the interviewer about every post they encountered and how they experienced it. Interestingly, there were only very few instances of news posts appearing on our respondents’ timelines during this first part of the interview. This was routinely picked up on as one of the first questions in the second part. Respondents described their encounters with news on these platforms most frequently as ‘sporadic’ or ‘incidental’:

I don’t use Instagram or TikTok to read the news. When I see something interesting, I will usually consume it and then it is nice to learn something new. But whenever I actually want to read news, I just open one of my news apps. (Respondent N.L.V.)

Whenever I actively want to look for something that happened, I will use a news app or website. But I won’t look for it on Instagram. (Respondent I.V.B.)

In different forms, but with similar phrases and attitudes, these respondents’ quotes reoccurred frequently throughout all interviews. Based on this, the first finding is that young adults are well aware of the presence of news on Instagram and TikTok, but they rarely actively seek it there (a finding in line with Anter and Kümpel, 2023). They readily acknowledge other, more traditional platforms that they themselves generally deem as more appropriate for news retrieval and consumption. While news content on social media is perceived as positive, a number of respondents indicated that they did not want ‘too much’ news in their feeds as it is not their priority. Without interviewers specifically inquiring about this, Facebook emerged as a dominant force for social media news consumption. This is unsurprising as the Digital News Report 2023 indicated that 38% of Belgian respondents often use Facebook for news consumption, as opposed to 14% for Instagram and 7% for TikTok—the latter two saw their shares rise, while Facebook has been dropping for a few years consistently:

I mainly see news on Facebook. I deliberately don’t follow too many news brands on TikTok or Instagram as I want to keep those platforms as pure entertainment. A lot less happens on Facebook these days, so I mainly see news posts there actually. (Respondent V.B.)

Multiple respondents highlighted the importance of social media for news consumption that was quick and convenient and can be consumed at any time they want, as opposed to traditional newspapers with several pages or lengthy television broadcasts with fixed broadcast times:

Honestly, I have a pretty short attention span. So that’s why I find TikTok and Instagram useful, as I feel that I am aware of what is happening in the world without having to be very focused for a long time. (Respondent E.M.T)

About half of all respondents indicated having at least one Flemish or international news app installed on their mobile phones. More traditional news consumption majorly occurred through habits installed by young adults’ parents, with various respondents indicating that they would still have the tradition of watching the nightly television news broadcasts or reading print newspapers, so their children (our respondents) would follow along. Several respondents who did not live at home, either temporarily because of their studies or permanently after having entered the workforce, indicated how they failed to incorporate these traditions in their own everyday news use. Social media aside, news consumption appears to have emerged as a convenience for young adults whenever they have time or nothing better to do. This explains why radio emerged as a popular source for news consumption, with several respondents indicating listening to it during car rides:

I only listen to the radio when I’m driving, and it’s also always on at my internship’s office. I like listening to it and find it useful to stay informed that way, but I would not put it on by choice here in my dorm room. (Respondent A.C.)

I moved out recently and do notice that I consume less news. The TV news used to be a family moment back at home with my parents, but I hardly ever put it on myself now. (Respondent R.V.D.)

The meaning of ‘news’

While not being a central topic in the study, most respondents inadvertently raised the point of what news is and means to them, and how their use of Instagram and TikTok changes this. The interviewers accordingly asked follow-up questions, yielding intriguing findings on the viewpoint of news as a concept by today’s young adults. They engage in their own form of boundary work by demarcating what news is and, especially, is not, and highlight their common association of the term with negative events in the world:

As the word says, news is what is new to me. ¹ Things that are happening now or happened recently and are important for society. (Respondent J.V.)

When I think of news, I think of negative things happening in the world. Like dramas in daycare centres, wars or train disasters. (Respondent M.A.)

News is new things that happened. Like sports, culture, and economics. But also accidents, when I think about it. Just the other day my mother told me about an article she saw on Facebook about a 23-year old who got hit in a car accident. So then I think ‘Oh, something happened!’ That’s how I mostly think about news. (Respondent E.C.)

Tied to this, a number of respondents denoted encountering several Flemish mainstream news outlets’ reporting of music festivals on Instagram, overlapping with the timing of the interviews. In spite of seeing and indicating that the publisher was a known news source, respondents still did not consider this type of reporting as news but rather as entertainment. The same applied for other forms of ‘soft news’ such as local and international celebrities’ changing relationship status:

I just saw this video of André Hazes [a Dutch singer also popular in Flanders] in my feed. Is that news? I guess so because something new is being told. But when I think of news, I think of the news of the day, breaking news, like something that happened in Ukraine or an accident or something, you know? (Respondent S.D.)

Swart and Broersma (2023)

identified four user responses to the increasingly blurry boundaries of news as a cultural form: reverting to traditional boundaries around news (traditionalism), distinguishing between different types of news (compartmentalization), labelling all novel information as news (homogenization), or re-interpreting classic news values and adjusting definitions of news (re-conceptualization). (p. 13)

While their findings are only applicable to Instagram, it is worth pointing out that they all are apparent in the respondents’ quotes highlighted above. Traditional forms of news content and consumption use remain known by young adults, although progressively less practised (see also De Marez et al., 2024), with a strong sense of labelling certain events and reports as (not being) news. As the next section will indicate, the perceived ‘newsness’ (Swart and Broersma, 2023: 10) of content shown on young users’ feeds also includes stark differences between Instagram and TikTok.

Experiencing news

The overwhelmingly negative connotation that the term ‘news’ carries for most of our respondents did not translate into active practices of avoiding news altogether. Rather, individual news posts on either platform were skipped if they did not align with the individual respondents’ interests or if they indicated ‘not having time’ to read an entire post’s caption or watch a video. This confirms the changed value of news as a commodity in today’s fast-paced digitised society. However, in spite of the negativeness generally associated with news, young adults are mostly positive about the presence and prevalence of news on their social media feeds. Particularly formats unique to the platforms, such as short Stories or explainer videos where current affairs are explained in layman’s terms, received praise as a novel way to experience news:

I think it’s great they do this, because it’s a very simple and fast way to find out about new things that are happening. This way you don’t have to watch the whole news broadcast, where they take a very long time to explain things. On TikTok I just know what is going on straight to the point. (Respondent A.C.)

This confirms the earlier deductions that young adults’ more sporadic, ephemeral news encounters also alter the way they experience it. News posts on Instagram or TikTok, literally surrounded in users’ feeds by various other content types, need to be instantly appealing to them at the risk of being scrolled past otherwise. Respondents indicated typically spending just a few seconds to decide internally whether or not they would engage with a news post, usually while scrolling at the same time:

The good thing about Instagram is that news there always has big pictures or videos. Normal news from De Standaard [a Flemish quality newspaper] or VRT NWS [the Flemish public broadcaster’s news service] is more monotonous with a lot of text, and pretty boring. (Respondent Y.M.)

Based on their own experiences, we denoted an equal split in respondents when it comes to perceiving how accurately and completely informed they feel about current affairs just by consuming news on social media:

I like following news via Instagram as it always tells me briefly what is going on. Usually you see something like ‘If you want to know more, click the link in bio’ and then you get redirected to their website article with more detailed information. Or sometimes they [journalists of Flemish news outlets working for the Instagram channel] also post answers to questions on their Story which I think is great for those who want to know more. (Respondent M.V.L.)

Whereas the respondents indicated roughly seeing as many news posts on their TikTok as their Instagram feeds, they also confirmed virtually unanimously that they associate the latter much more with news than the former. This also explains why they typically followed more news accounts on Instagram than on TikTok. Simultaneously, Instagram is associated with softer news that is more entertainment-driven, as opposed to harder news content that is still primarily linked with more traditional news channels:

I think I would likely see more news on TikTok if I followed more accounts, yes. But I typically just check my ‘For You’ page, I hardly ever seek out content there. To me, TikTok is mainly just to watch silly videos, not for serious things. (Respondent H.V.L.)

It appears that even in the social media landscape, Instagram tends to be perceived as a platform that requires more attention and focus from its users when it comes to consuming news. Typically, a post can be composed of up to 10 different ‘panels’ with a combination of pictures or videos. TikTok, however, only has video content with a maximum duration of 3 minutes per video at the time of writing. Respondents indicate how they feel news publishers on TikTok try to adhere to the latest trends and viral songs by incorporating them in their reporting. Hence, news on TikTok tends to be experienced as more sensational, with Instagram boasting a more informative profile:

TikTok is still more playful, faster and livelier. It needs to attract your attention immediately or people scroll away. Instagram is a bit slower so it lends itself better to giving more explanations. (Respondent J.V.)

I think TikTok is somehow less informative. At Sporza [the sports news outlet of the Flemish public broadcaster], they also report on a sports team’s victory, but they use a funny tune in the background or use certain visual effects. So that makes it more entertaining for me. Instagram is more information-driven as it also has more pictures, while TikTok has more soft content. (Respondent S.D.)

Discussion and conclusion

In this article, I built on the increasing dislocation of news and journalism (Ekström and Westlund, 2019), the acknowledged rise of agentic citizens choosing to engage with news content dramatically differently than generations preceding them (Hendrickx, 2021; 2022) and the spatial (Peters, 2012), emotional (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020) and audience turns in journalism (Costera Meijer, 2020). From the understanding that social media journalism—the production, diffusion and consumption of news content directly through social media platforms (Hendrickx, 2023)—is rapidly rising (Newman, 2022) and that a qualitative angle on this trend from the individual user’s perspective was lacking (Lewis, 2020), I followed Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink (2021) to focus on how young people encounter and experience news on Instagram and TikTok as the two fastest rising social media platforms for news consumption (Newman et al., 2023). Through a series of two-phase in-depth interviews with 25 young Belgian (Flemish) adults, carried out and analysed by two student researchers and myself in the first half of 2023, this article shines light on this relatively novel and at the time of writing rather underresearched phenomenon.

Answering the research questions of this article, existing normative ideals about the values and the importance of consuming news and gaining knowledge on what is happening in their surroundings and the world guide the young respondents’ general positive sentiment about the presence of news on Instagram and TikTok. While rarely actively seeking it out and moving away from traditional consumption patterns in fixed packages and/or times, their encounters with news-related content are overwhelmingly considered as a good thing, with several respondents applauding efforts by legacy news outlets to use the affordances of Instagram and TikTok for novel types of storytelling at the convenience of the young user base in terms of visual and linguistic styles and techniques. Of course, these encounters are predominantly shaped by black-box algorithms, which majorly affect usage of either platform. On TikTok, news is not recommended proactively and even users who express interest in news are not being shown content from credible news sources more readily (Hagar and Diakopoulos, 2023). While this arguably somewhat mitigates the relevance of audience agency and makes it an uphill battle for news organisations to invest time and resources in the platform, the positive perceptions towards news on social media can serve as a hopeful signal—although it needs to be reiterated that respondents of this study established a less overt link between news content and TikTok as opposed with Instagram, which boasts a more ‘serious’ outlook. Nevertheless, based on the clear rise of news outlets present on both platforms to offer quality news content in brand-building exercises (Hase et al., 2023; Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2022) and the heightened scholarly attention for the topic, the power of audiences to switch to different platforms for media consumption and journalists and scholars having to follow in their footsteps proves the need for a stronger focus on user agency.

Today’s young adults remain aware of habits in traditional news consumption, beholden by their parents or older peers. They draw on past experiences and engagements and operationalise these to make sense of their own media use and the world (Anter and Kümpel, 2023; Xia, 2023). At the same time, they are developing their own, mostly entirely digital news encountering patterns wherein fixed times of consuming newspapers or watching television news are rapidly becoming ancient history. News on social media is a much more happenstance affair, stripped from its unique, privileged role as the key commodity in traditional media platforms and rather only forming a small portion of users’ overall (social) media experience.

The findings of this study highlight the changed value of news as a commodity that is consumed wherever and however individuals deem fit, rather than this decision taken by traditional media outlets themselves in terms of choosing when to publish or broadcast their news. On Facebook and X/Twitter, designated social media editors mainly repurpose existing online news content and ‘sell’ to users of said platforms by coming up with eye-catching status messages and emoji (Opgenhaffen & Hendrickx, 2023; Lischka, 2021). However, the advent of Instagram and TikTok has led to the emergence of novel types of news content created specifically for consumption within the platforms themselves, without the intention to lure audiences away from social media platforms to news organisations’ own websites and apps (Hase et al., 2023). This is bound to exacerbate the spatial, emotional and audience turns in journalism studies and practice considerably in the years to come. This situation, with the spaces, the tone and the power of the audience of news all rapidly altering as a direct consequence of the global popularity of social media research, begs the question what counts as news to begin with (Harcup, 2023). In line with this, it is worth pointing out that the 2023 Digital News Report notes how, across all investigated markets, legacy and alternative news outlets both rank below personalities (including celebrities and influencers) when it comes to sources of content users of Instagram and TikTok pay most attention to for news (Newman et al., 2023: 13). Needless to say, this upends existing demarcations of what constitutes news content, also explaining why no set definition was given to the respondents of our study (and additionally in line with the affective perceptions of what constitutes news or not; see Swart and Broersma, 2023). While reiterating that respondents of this study still mostly held highly normative assumptions and widely associated news content on Instagram and TikTok with known, reputable news outlets, this again begs the question what we as scholars should consider as being news or not. This debate has already far transcended the boundaries of conceptual discussions among scholars, but rather forms—or should form—the fabric of the wider contemporary societal discussion on news, journalism and social media. Only when we gain a better, joint understanding of the unique characteristics of news content in the digital era can societies properly start to discuss its constraints and contingencies. As researchers, we are bestowed with the singular role of debating this crucial issue driven by sound academic data and information. Ultimately, it is therefore the responsibility of all of us to make sure that this discussion takes place in our respective societies, in a way that is fair and equal for all.

This study has focused on just some of the ‘embodied, practical, emotional, spatial, social, linguistic and temporal aspects’ of people’s experiences (Wertz et al., 2011: 127, quoted from Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2021: 2). In their 24 distinguished practices of news use, several apply to how our respondents described their own encounters and experiences with news on social media platforms. Next to obvious ones such as scrolling and liking, two of the most prevalent other practices were snacking (‘users consum[ing] bits and pieces of information in a relaxed, easygoing fashion to fill time while waiting for an appointment or to create a moment for oneself’, Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2021: 24) and scanning, which is ‘about efficiently seeing whether there are any new developments one should know about, often within a specific domain’ (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2021: 25). In assembling their own media consumption diet through social media platforms, young adults as agentic users consider news less as a fixed package delivered in the form of a daily newspaper or a TV news broadcast that offers summaries of all the latest news in one go. Rather, news is increasingly consumed in bits and pieces, based on what is shown on users’ timelines. Just half of our respondents indicated feeling sufficiently informed this way. How this perception will evolve in the near future remains to be seen, but should deserve additional scholarly attention, particularly from the angle of studying individuals’ news experiences.

Here, I also draw attention to the finding that while news as a concept was generally considered as skewing negative, the presence of news on social media was overwhelmingly heralded as something positive. Respondents indicated the importance of consuming news and being aware of what is happening around them and elsewhere in the world. It is important to highlight that this presence can also rapidly be considered as overkill, again stressing the heightened dependency of news outlets on social media’s black-box algorithms (Meese and Hurcombe, 2021) which only sprinkle bits and pieces of news content through their users’ feeds. A deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind this algorithm and the composition of individual timelines is desirable to advance scholarship, particularly with platforms such as Facebook prioritising news content less rather than more. Both this turn and the findings of this study confirm that social media platforms were not created as vessels for news content consumption, and, particularly in light of multiple major privacy and government-related issues, should never be considered solely as such by scholars, newsroom workers or regulators alike. Nevertheless, in order for their survival as reputed news titles and continued brand awareness, it remains imperative that they are actively offering credible, quality content on the platforms where their target audience spends the majority of their (digital) time.

This study comes with obvious caveats. The number of respondents is limited and the findings are not necessarily generalisable to other audiences and markets due to the focus on young Flemish (Belgian) adults who use TikTok and Instagram frequently. Nevertheless, this article aids in researchers’ and newsroom workers’ sensemaking process of how young audiences encounter and experience news content on the two fastest rising social media platforms. I hope this article can serve as a bountiful foundation for more qualitative research on people’s experiences with news on these and other third-party platforms. Next to a plea for more scholarly attention and resources devoted to in-depth interview studies and more novel approaches such as the walkalong method, the turns in journalism research and the shift to social media news production and consumption present a unique, exciting opportunity for scholars to broaden their research horizons considerably. In the past decade, collaborations between communication and computer scholars have intensified tremendously. As a result, the field of quantitative journalism scholarship has been enriched with various vast studies focused on big data, offering indispensable knowledge about media users’ behaviour (e.g. Vargo et al., 2018). But if we as researchers are serious about effectuating the spatial, emotional and audience turns in journalism studies and thereby manifest the much-needed qualitative research angle, similar academic partnerships must be pursued with those scholars experienced in studying citizens’ emotions and feelings: neuroscientists. Only when we as communication scholars accustom ourselves with the study of senses and sensory experiences can we as a field truly advance and offer more innovative insights in how news is experienced. A handful of recent studies use eye-tracking measurement to closely monitor respondents’ visual behaviour towards news on social media platforms (see, for instance, Sülflow et al., 2019). This counts as a promising start to what hopefully can emerge as a new, proper subdiscipline of research focusing on individuals’ news encounters and experiences.