With governments across the world tightening the noose around the media, many journalists, along with people from non-news backgrounds, have taken it upon themselves to deliver journalism in their independent capacities, without the backing of big media channels. This has led to the blurring of boundaries between news influencers and journalists.
The trend is especially getting popular in the United States with almost 37% of adults under 30 years of age (18-29 years) getting their news from news influencers on social media, instead of television news channels, newspapers or magazines, reveals a recent study by the Pew Research Center.
Around 85% of the news influencers in the US were found on the social media site X (formerly Twitter), followed by Instagram (50%) and YouTube (44%).
A similar trend was reported in the 13th edition of the Digital News Report (DNR), by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, based on data from six continents and 47 markets. The report found that YouTube was used for news by almost a third (31%) of their global sample each week, followed by WhatsApp (21%), TikTok (13%) and X (10%).
The report also said that in many countries ‘news media (is) increasingly challenged by rising mis- and disinformation, low trust, attacks by politicians, and an uncertain business environment’.
Both reports highlight the important rise of news influencers on various social media platforms, across the globe to disseminate news to their audiences directly, without the involvement of, or dependence on, corporate media houses.
Influencers coming from a news background who are now taking social media by storm include people like Bianca Gralau who quit her job with an American news channel in 2019 due to censorship and is now growing her audience on YouTube (182K subscribers) and Instagram (274K followers) and other social media channels.
Explaining to her subscribers why working with mainstream media has grown increasingly difficult, she said that a publication had asked her not to name a hotel that was causing large scale environmental damage in the name of increasing tourism in a documentary she was working on. She cited ‘censorship’ as the main reason for quitting her job. This led her to pursuing her own path and starting her own YouTube and other social media channels that could connect her to her audiences without any censorship.
“What I saw is that in corporate news being objective often meant aligning with the establishment with corporate interests and with the western perspective of the world,” she said in a video titled Why I Left Corporate Media.
Many journalists in other countries, including India, have tread down a similar path. A path that has seemed more appealing than having their newsroom’s coverage be influenced by the owners of the publication who might have vested interest in protecting their multi-million-dollar businesses and political ties.
Faye D’Souza, another full-time journalist with an Indian media channel, quit her job in 2019 to start her own YouTube channel and news pages on social media. She now has 341K subscribers on You Tube, 1.9 million and 1.1 million followers on Instagram and X, respectively.
Ravish Kumar, an Indian journalist who has received the Ramon Magsaysay Award and the 2024 RSF Press Freedom Award, quit NDTV in 2022 citing concerns about press freedom. He now publishes to an audience of of 12.2 million on YouTube, 4.4 million on Instagram and 3.9 million on X.
This comes as a time when these platforms are actually disengaging from news, tweaking their algorithms and systems to down rank news and news-related posts.
“Elon Musk has turned Twitter (now known as X) into a much bleaker environment for journalism. The platform […]is sending much less traffic to news organizations,” read an October 2023 article by Gretel Kahn on the Reuters Institute's website. It further added, “Meta has decisively disengaged from journalism, particularly on Facebook.”
So what does this mean for who audiences will get their news from?
The Pew study found that in the US, around 77% of news influencers did not have a background in journalism or any experience of working with a news organization, adding that such news influencers were more likely to express their opinions on politics, gender etc in their videos.
“Slightly more news influencers explicitly identify as Republican, conservative or pro-Donald Trump (27% of news influencers) than Democratic, liberal or pro-Kamala Harris (21%),” read the analysis of the report published on November 18, 2024.
“Nearly one-in-five news influencers (18%) share part of their identity or beliefs beyond their political orientation, such as expressing support for a specific political cause or value through words, images or emojis on their account page. Among the most common expressions are LGBTQ+ identity or support (6%) or being pro-Palestinian (5%),” it added.
This is in contrast to journalists in newsrooms because most journalists who have worked or are working in newsrooms are trained to keep their personal opinions out of the news. They are told to put facts and figures forward, and let the audiences decide for themselves.
Rishad Patel of Splice Media, a Singapore-based start-up to help media and journalists thrive in the digital age, however, says that unbiased news is not necessarily a good thing.
“The nature of news is not inherently unbiased, nor is the lack of bias inherently ‘bad’, as long as it is made evident, or that there is supporting context. We have seen journalists express opinions and biases across the spectrum, and we are continually confronted with evidence that newsroom experience is, unfortunately, not a guarantor of verifiable information that users actually need,” he said in his email response to InOldNews’ questions.
Alex Mahadevan, Director of MediaWise at Poynter shares similar views. He said that while it was problematic that news influencers (who do not have a background with a news organization) don’t operate under traditional journalism ethics, the idea of “unbiased news” might be fraught, bordering on being fictitious.
Gralau in her videos highlights the same thing. “Another reason why I quit - bias. I don’t mean they were all biased and I wasn’t and so I left. I mean, we were not honest about our biases. I don’t think there’s such a thing as being objective in the news”, she said in the video.
She explains that from the moment a journalist picks a topic they want to cover, their bias is at play.
“You’re deciding what’s important enough to tell people about and that is filtered through your particular lens. [..] You’re making a lot of decisions along the way and those are subjective. So, I think, we do a disservice to our audience by pretending to be objective,” she added.
The report further found that while most Americans (65%) say news influencers have helped them better understand current events and civic issues, this doesn’t necessarily mean they agree with everything they hear. Most audiences say there are an even mix of opinions they agree and disagree with (61%), but far more say they mostly agree with what they see (30%) than mostly disagree (2%).
Reuters in its 13th DNR adds that while it was evident that consumption of content across social media platforms was increasing, concerns about what is real and what is fake on the internet when it comes to online news has risen by three percentage points in the last year with around six in ten (59%) saying they are concerned.
Mahadevan said, “(In) disclosing their own biases, (news influencers) can actually build trust with the audience. They just need to be clear about how their biases impact what they cover. And that's not always the case.”
While the credibility of news organizations across the world hangs in the balance – mostly due to the practice of depending upon the availability of news and information rather than its actual demand among the audience, and relying too heavily on advertising for revenue generation, Patel added that even though creators and influencers have a great deal to learn from traditional journalists about the rigor of verification and process around information, journalists also have a lot to learn from creators and influencers about understanding user needs, audiences, relevance, and acting on feedback.
“The condescending assumption by the journalism industry that important issues like accountability, verifiability, climate, gender equity, democracy, recourse to justice, and equality under law are the exclusive domain of the journalist is another reason for the lack of trust in the media. People have real problems, and communities have real needs. Contrary to what traditional journalists believe, most people aren’t waiting around for big-J-Journalism to raise them up from their mire of TikTok dances and cat videos,” said Patel.
This raises questions about the future of journalism and what it entails.
“The future of journalism is already here. Modern media is not content-centered, supply-driven, or ad-based. It is user-centered, demand-driven, and interest-based. In its best form, it responds to user demand, community need, and audience interest. The future has been like this for a while now — it’s just that traditional news organizations are only just catching up to this future,” Patel added.
Mahadevan also feels that creators and influencers are a huge part of the future of journalism as their audiences are growing exponentially while the media industry is struggling.
“This year [2024] was arguably the influencer election, with both Harris and Trump appearing on notable podcasts. Influencers and creators have a better relationship with their audiences: They know how to reach them — they're masters of their respective platforms — and know what they want. The journalism industry needs to form partnerships with creators,” he says.
Patel feels that there has never been a greater need for demand-driven journalism, aimed at helping people solve the problems they say they have. Journalism’s greatest opportunity is to ask its users what they need – and then obsess about serving them.
To cater to this growing number of influencers, organizations like Poynter are looking to help them create trustworthy — as well as engaging — content.
“And we can all learn to be a little more like influencers: Audience-focused and social-first,” Mahadevan adds.