The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023 says that 1 adult in 5 people aged under 24 goes to TikTok to check news. This is one of many examples showing how the content creators on social media are getting a boost and legacy media is lagging as a news platform.

The same report also mentions that the number of users checking TikTok for news has increased by 5% compared to last year. Further, Britain’s Office of Communications has announced that young adults in the UK now watch more TikTok than television.

But why is this shift so prominent these days? News stories and how they are consumed were already going through a series of changes. The changes may have been small, but they were significant to lead to the paradigm shift that we can witness today.

Nevertheless, content creators offering news stories are now leaving the legacy media behind because they are getting the information in an informal way. The facts and figures are there, sans the air of brooding seriousness. At the same time, social media users are getting to see news that “feels relevant” to them.

Social media also gets an edge here because it is easily accessible to youngsters, and they can follow the news at a time and space convenient for them.

Many will argue that The Washington Post and New York Times have a surge in digital subscribers. That does not change the scenario with prominent examples of the economy of news shifting. Even a digital news service like BuzzFeed had to stop operations in April owing to this change in the news economy.

So, this change is going to become more prominent in the upcoming days, with legacy media struggling to attract and sustain news consumers. In the 2023 Digital News Report, Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said,

“There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older.”

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