TikTok Journalism

Claudia Mellado1

It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding how journalism is evolving in response to rapidly changing digital environments. Among the many vibrant and pressing areas of inquiry in contemporary journalism studies, the intersection between journalism and TikTok stands out as particularly dynamic and consequential. In less than a decade, TikTok has transformed from a short-form entertainment app into a global digital stage where news is produced, shared, consumed—and often contested. This book, TikTok Journalism: News, Media, and Journalists in the Short Video Era, provides a comprehensive and timely examination of this phenomenon, dissecting its many layers with intellectual rigor and empirical breadth.

The chapters assembled here do not merely explore the platform’s novelty or popularity, but also expose the underlying tensions, adaptations, and negotiations that occur when journalistic practices enter a media environment governed by algorithmic curation, memetic circulation, and audiovisual immediacy. The book’s contributors, from diverse academic traditions, offer a deeply grounded and multifaceted analysis that goes beyond surface-level observations of trends. They delve into how TikTok reshapes professional norms, audience relationships, news values, and the very definition of journalism itself.

What makes TikTok journalism a particularly fertile site for academic inquiry is not just its technological novelty or cultural popularity but the profound epistemological and professional challenges it poses. TikTok defies the traditional architecture of legacy media and even other social platforms. It is driven less by interpersonal connections than by content discovery, less by editorial hierarchy than by participatory aesthetics, and less by text than by highly visual, emotive, and algorithmically shaped storytelling. This requires journalists—and journalism scholars—to rethink not only how the profession is practiced, but also how it is conceptualized.

In this context, the book offers a vital contribution by providing both a theoretical grounding and a rich set of empirical cases that show how journalism adapts—or struggles to adapt—to the platform’s logics.

As the opening chapters eloquently show, TikTok’s architecture generates a set of affordances that reshape how journalistic content is produced, circulated, and consumed. Importantly, these platform-specific features are not neutral. They encourage certain styles of communication while discouraging others. The book’s analysis of affordances thus opens a critical space for discussing how platform logics reconfigure journalistic roles, strategies, and values.

Moreover, the volume emphasizes the methodological implications of researching journalism on TikTok. It foregrounds the need for multimodal, empirical, and often interdisciplinary approaches that can capture the fleeting, audiovisual, and highly contextual nature of TikTok content.

The book also provides a fascinating look at how established news outlets are navigating TikTok’s ecosystem. Far from offering a uniform response, the chapters show a variety of strategies—from enthusiastic adoption and innovation to more cautious experimentation, highlighting the ways in which organizational legacies, public service mandates, and local market pressures shape how media outlets engage with the platform. One of the most salient insights here is that while some newsrooms have created platform-native formats that resonate with TikTok’s stylistic conventions, others struggle to balance the demands of the algorithm with journalistic standards.

What emerges is a complex picture of journalism in flux, where institutions attempt to reconcile their editorial missions with the logics of virality, engagement, and trend-following. This negotiation often involves a shift from text-based storytelling to audiovisual narratives, from expert-driven reporting to participatory and affective formats.

Against this backdrop, the book further explores how journalists interpret, adapt, and sometimes resist the affordances and constraints of TikTok, offering powerful reminders that platforms are not deterministic environments. From interviews with influential TikTok journalists to analyses of gatekeeping, algorithmic literacy, and hate speech moderation, this volume reveals the diversity of journalistic strategies—and the unevenness of platform expertise. Some journalists embrace TikTok as a space for transparency, accessibility, and audience connection. Others view it with suspicion or frustration, wary of the time investment and the risk of compromising professional integrity.

Crucially, this book also speaks to broader debates about journalistic role performance, inviting readers to consider how different journalistic missions are performed differently on TikTok compared to other media environments, and raising critical questions about how authority, objectivity, and trust are (re)negotiated in a space where the lines between journalism, influence, and entertainment are increasingly blurred.

In the fourth section, this volume turns our attention to the audience—not as passive consumers but as active participants, co-creators, and interpreters of news on TikTok, examining how users engage with journalistic content, how they express political and civic concerns through short videos, and how TikTok becomes a space for everyday storytelling, activism, and identity work.

In doing so, it challenges assumptions about audience disengagement or apathy. It shows that, when approached on their own terms, audiences—especially younger ones—are capable of sophisticated forms of meaning-making, critique, and journalistic engagement. Moreover, the chapters of the book offer valuable insights into how TikTok reconfigures the conditions for public debate. They suggest that the platform facilitates a “fractured public sphere”—one that is multisensory, affective, and shaped by algorithmic logics. Yet within this fragmentation lies the potential for new forms of participation, new publics, and new journalistic interventions.

Finally, the book discuss how TikTok’s architecture creates fertile ground for conspiracy theories, hyperpartisan narratives, and content that mimics journalistic formats without meeting journalistic standards. In that context, the chapters document how journalists and fact-checkers are developing innovative strategies to counter falsehoods on TikTok, which is especially valuable because it connects the study of journalism with wider concerns about platform governance, media literacy, and algorithmic accountability.

What makes this book a relevant contribution to the field of journalism studies is not only its subject matter but also its methodological ambition and international scope. The chapters cover diverse national contexts—including Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Argentina, the Netherlands, Australia, and Ibero-America more broadly—offering rich comparative insights. In this way, the editors succeed in integrating diverse cases into a cohesive analytical tapestry.

Moreover, they demonstrate an acute awareness of the evolving media landscape, not just as a backdrop to journalism, but as a constitutive force. The book’s engagement with this environment is both critical and constructive. It avoids technological determinism, while also resisting nostalgic accounts of journalism’s past. Instead, it invites us to think seriously—and creatively—about what journalism can become.

As someone who has studied journalistic roles and the interplay between media systems and journalistic cultures, I find this volume both intellectually stimulating and relevant. It reminds us that journalism is not static but evolving, contested, and always embedded within broader technological, cultural, and political transformations.

While the book does not provide easy answers, it offers something more valuable: a conceptual and empirical map to navigate the dynamic and consequential shifts in journalism today. TikTok may be one of the latest frontier in this evolution, but the questions raised here—about trust, participation, aesthetics, and power—are far-reaching.

Jorge Vázquez-Herrero is an associate professor at the Department of Communication Sciences, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain). He holds a Ph.D. in Communication, an M.A. in Communication and Creative Industries, and a B.A. in Audiovisual Communication. He is a member of the Novos Medios research group (USC), the Galician Institute of Studies and Development (IDEGA), and the Latin American Chair of Transmedia Narratives (UNR). He was a visiting scholar at Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Universidade do Minho, University of Leeds, Tampere University, HU Utrecht, and Universidade de Cabo Verde. He has edited three books and published around 100 chapters and articles in journals such as Journalism, Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies, Social Media + Society, and International Journal of Communication, among others. He participates in international conferences such as ICA, IAMCR, and ECREA, having presented more than 60 papers in the last 10 years. He is involved in organizations such as the Stakeholder Advisory Group of the International Observatory on Information and Democracy, and the International Panel on the Information Environment. His research focuses on the impact of technology and platforms in digital journalism and narratives, including recent studies on disinformation and social media journalism.

María-Cruz Negreira-Rey is an associate professor at the Department of Communication Sciences, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain). She holds a Ph.D. in Communication, an M.A. in Digital Information, and a B.A. in Journalism. She is a member of the Novos Medios research group and the Galician Institute of Studies and Development (IDEGA). She has edited three books and published around 50 chapters and articles in Journalism, Media and Communication, Journalism Practice, International Journal of Communication, among others, and she serves as a member of the editorial board of Digital Journalism. She was a visiting scholar at HU Utrecht and Universidade de Cabo Verde. She participates in international conferences such as ICA, IAMCR, and ECREA, having presented more than 50 papers in the last 10 years. Her lines of research focus mainly on digital media, local and hyperlocal journalism, social media, and audiences.

Ana-Isabel Rodríguez-Vázquez graduated in Information Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and holds a Ph.D. in Journalism from Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC, Spain). Since 2003, she has been an associate professor at the Faculty of Communication Sciences (USC). The audience is her main focus in teaching and research. She teaches subjects such as Audiences and media (Degree in Journalism) and Audiences and News Consumption (Master’s Degree in Journalism and Multimedia Communication). She demonstrates the transfer of her teaching and research activities through participation in contracts with companies and she pays special attention to media literacy as a necessary commitment to building critical audiences capable of combating disinformation. Her research has been published in journals indexed in JCR Q1 and Scopus. She has also published book chapters with prestigious publishers including Routledge, Springer, Pearson, Comunicación Social, Gedisa, and Editorial UOC. She participates in international conferences such as IAMCR, ECREA, AE-IC, and SEP and attends courses, seminars, and webinars sponsored by professional entities related to audience research: Kantar Media, Comscore, Parrot Analytics, and others.

The editors sincerely thank all the authors for their valuable contributions to this book. We also extend our gratitude to Elizabeth Howard, Elena Mora Rubio and Kalaivani Prabhu from Peter Lang for their dedicated support throughout the publication process.

We acknowledge the support of the Novos Medios research group (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela), coordinated by Prof. Xosé López García and recognized as a Competitive Reference Group (ref. ED431C 2023/011) by Consellería de Educación, Ciencia, Universidades e Formación Profesional (Xunta de Galicia).

Jorge Vázquez-Herrero, María-Cruz Negreira-Rey and Ana-Isabel Rodríguez-Vázquez

Abstract

The popularization of TikTok has encouraged media outlets and journalists to join this platform, which is characterized by short vertical videos, algorithmic recommendation, and viral trends. Beginning in 2019, news media around the world began adapting to the logic of this social media platform to reach new audiences that inhabit this space. The evolution of journalistic practices and new forms of consumption lead us to talk about the concept of TikTok journalism and, consequently, to the proposal of this book. From a systematized literature review, the main milestones, methods, and topics in the research of this object of study are established. Finally, the contents of this book are presented.

Keywords: journalism; news; media; research