A recent report found that while the audience for traditional news outlets is shrinking, the online audience for independent news sources is growing.
Ameer Al-Khatahtbeh graduated in 2020 with a degree in journalism from Rutgers University. But instead of going to work in a traditional newsroom, he decided to build his own digital news brand catering to the Muslim community.
That’s certainly the experience of Al-Khatahtbeh, who built an audience upon the realization that “there was no mainstream outlet that focused on the Muslim community,” he said, which makes up a quarter of the world’s population. On TikTok alone, @Muslim’s follower count is larger than the average daily audience of 1.1 million people watching Fox News.
While many online news creators are, like Al-Khatahtbeh, trained journalists collecting new information, others are aggregators and partisan commentators sometimes masquerading as journalists. The transformation has made the public sphere much more “chaotic and contradictory,” said Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the PressThink blog, adding that it has never been easier to be both informed and misinformed about world events.
Harris once worked for Vox, a news and opinion site founded in 2014 by journalists from The Post and Slate. His switch to YouTube has been so successful that he recently recruited another former Vox journalist to launch a second channel. He hopes eventually to build a network of journalist content creators and operate “effectively a music label for independent journalists.
Several social media platforms have emerged to serve conservative audiences. Rumble, BitChute and Telegram give right-wing creators a place to monetize, becoming magnets for accounts banned elsewhere, such as Alex Jones of Infowars, who was banned from YouTube and other mainstream platforms for violating hate speech policies.
“People didn’t know how old I was at the time I was sharing news about the Mets,” he said. “I had a podcast on Blog Talk Radio; my voice hadn’t even cracked yet.” Other Instagram accounts including the Shade Room, Diet Prada, DeuxMoi and Comments By Celebs also deliver up-to-the-minute information via social media, becoming entertainment news powerhouses with dozens of staffers, millions of followers and related books and podcasts. Sports pages such as Hoops Nation break news faster than ESPN.
“When you’re delivering the news in a country that has record-low trust in the media, part of that has to do with the lack of trust in larger brands,” Oinounou said. “I think it’s important that all journalists are building credibility directly with the audience.” Meredith Lynch, a TikTok creator in Los Angeles who posts investigative videos on topics ranging from pop culture to the private equity industry, said TikTokers not only hop on breaking news, but often surface scoops before traditional outlets.News content creators can have difficult relationships with the platforms on which their businesses depend.
“I hate to say it,” Grueskin added, but it also marks “the diminishing importance of a lot of traditional media in the eyes of the under 35 demographic.”
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