Gen Z Getting News From Tik-Tok

Artwork from Gabriel Hollington for The Washington Post

On the evening of Election Day 2020, Marcus DiPaola kept hearing the same thing: People were turning off cable news because results were coming in slowly. So, The Washington Post reports, he recorded brief polling updates from his D.C. apartment at the top of every hour with data from FiveThirtyEight and the JHK Presidential Forecast, then posted them to his TikTok profile.

Within five minutes, DiPaola’s first video received 200,000 likes. Flash forward six months, and his TikTok journalism still follows the same formula: In a 30- to 60- second clip, he delivers a to-the-point news update. He has amassed 2.5 million followers.

DiPaola’s popularity is part of a larger trend unfolding across TikTok right now: Personalities unaffiliated with any traditional media outlet are aggregating national headlines and the latest news — and delivering it to millions, many of them young viewers, on the video platform.

He may be on to something. As of June 2020, the 10-to-19 age range made up the largest portion of TikTok’s audience in the United States at 32.5 percent, according to Statista, a consumer data company. And in a 2020 survey from YPulse, a youth brand research firm, 51 percent of Gen Z respondents reported getting their news on TikTok, as opposed to 26 percent of millennials. (Pew Research Center considers anyone born from 1997 onward part of Gen Z, meaning the oldest in the cohort are turning 24 this year.)

Lisa Remillard

“While Gen Z consumers make their buying choices based on advice from influencers on TikTok, the leap to having them consume their news and information from news influencers is not very far,” says Marcus Messner, director of the Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture at Virginia Commonwealth University. “This widens the gap of how different generations choose their news sources, as the older generation probably has never heard of these TikTok personalities while they have millions of followers among Gen Z users.”

DiPaola started making TikTok videos when, because of the pandemic, he was unable to cover political campaigns in person as a freelancer this past fall. With work drying up, DiPaola relocated from D.C. to his parents’ place in New Jersey soon after Election Day.

Fellow TikTok news personalities Josh Helfgott and Lisa Remillard realized in 2020 that all it took to build their brand and spread the news was a camera, decent lighting and background knowledge in storytelling. Helfgott has more than 3.1 million followers, and Remillard has a million.

In many ways, being able to script, record and edit a video all in one platform is like having a broadcast studio at your fingertips, which is what drew Remillard, known as “The News Girl,” to the app. She had previously worked for a variety of ABC News affiliates and now runs her own video production company, Beond TV, in Los Angeles.