NiemanLab – Three journalists explain how to use the platform for news – We’ve reached “peak news explainer” on TikTok, Sophia Smith Galer said last week at the IMEDD International Journalism Forum in Athens, Greece. To break through on the platform, news outlets and journalists can’t rely exclusively on explainers and reworking existing articles. Smith Galer was one of three TikTok-focused journalists who spoke about how journalists are experimenting on the platform. She’s a freelance journalist who was most recently a senior correspondent for Vice World News and, before that, was at the BBC. (She found it difficult to “persuade the beeb to see the public service opportunities provided by TikTok,” she tweeted last year, though the BBC now calls TikTok “a crucial platform.”) Smith Galer has more than 500,000 followers on TikTok and more than 15 million likes on her videos. In her presentation “News outlets are on TikTok, but where are the journalists?” Smith Galer made the case that individual journalists can and should become TikTok creators. Right now, according to a December 2022 report from the Reuters Institute for Journalism, news publishers are generally using TikTok in one of four ways:

• Correspondents giving their quick takes on the news
• Socially native content by news brands that are bespoke and distinctive
• Broadcasters that reuse existing video content, often sticking to traditional news agendas
• Popular news brands creating a “natural playground” for celebrity news and scoops”