Challenging media to be like ‘friends giving updates’

MANILA, Philippines — When billionaire Donald Trump first won the US presidency in 2016, there was at least one organization that saw a windfall from his shocking victory against Hillary Clinton: the New York Times (NYT).

Immediately after the election, the United States’ newspaper of record saw a dramatic rise in both print and online subscriptions, according to journalism professor Julia Wallace.

These subscriptions, it seemed, were driven in part by uncertainty about the upcoming administration, as well as a desire to support the paper amid Trump’s frequent attacks against the NYT and legacy media as “fake news.”

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“If you had told me that was going to be the result of Trump’s win, I would not have believed you,” Wallace told the Inquirer. “So there really is no telling what will happen if he or [Vice President Kamala Harris] wins,” said Wallace, who serves as the Frank Russell chair at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism–Arizona State University (ASU).

Wallace spoke about the impact on journalism of the US presidential elections a few days before the Nov. 5 balloting, which saw the Republican’s Trump sweep both the electoral and the popular vote against Democratic candidate Harris.

Common problems

The Inquirer was one of the news organizations invited by the US Department of State to take part in a foreign reporting tour to cover the elections—and to speak with US colleagues about the state of the media landscape in a highly divided America.

Most of the 16 reporters from 16 countries chosen for the tour work for traditional media in countries that Reporters Without Borders, known by its French acronym, RSF, had classified as having problematic press freedoms.

Ranking from 1 to 180 (the least problematic to the worst) in RSF’s press freedom index, they include Brazil (ranked 82), Burkina Faso (86), India (159), Egypt (170), Philippines (134) and Kazakhstan (142).

Common among these countries’ media landscapes are problems of declining readership and public trust in the media, a “news-fatigued” audience, and governments that have curtailed freedom of speech and expression. Television and print media, once the cornerstones of public information, are grappling with dwindling audiences and readers.

Meanwhile, over-the-air broadcasts and traditional formats are increasingly replaced by digital and on-demand consumption, or instant access to content or services, as social media platforms like TikTok emerge as influential spaces, particularly among younger people.

Sharing the audience

Now, said Oumar Zombre, a journalist from Burkina Faso and a Humphrey Fellow under the ASU, traditional media’s competitors are no longer each other but social media influencers, who are “cracking down the information to their target audience.”

“That is where influencers get more power,” he said. “I’m not saying they’re stealing, but we’re sharing the audience with them. And that is why most traditional media have been working hard to integrate [across multiple platforms].”

Carol Yancho, senior director of content at Arizona PBS, said that the biggest lesson they’ve learned in recent years for all traditional media is “to diversify and to produce content that’s across platforms.”

“Now that doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to produce different content all the time. You can produce the same content, but it’s how you package it for those specific platforms,” she said.

Right now, for example, PBS has accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and X. But their most successful is their TikTok subaccount for Antiques Roadshow (@roadshowpbs), which has 6 million followers.

Yancho said the account actually helped drive viewership toward the linear television program instead of taking away an audience.

“Some of the comments say they would eventually go to watch the television program because they love to find out about people’s old finds,” she said. “So, it just goes to show you that it depends on how you’re packaging the content. You need to meet audiences where they are.”

Social media a given

Using social media to complement their coverage on traditional media has become a given even for other journalists abroad.

Bradley Harris, a reporter for UK’s Channel 5, shared how he would often write two separate scripts for each news item: one for television, and a short form video script for his channel’s social media accounts.

Whenever he puts out a piece for TV, Harris said it’s “rare for me not to have to write” an equivalent script for TikTok or IG Reels.

The same goes for Leticia Martinez, the international political reporter for Argentina’s TV Publica. Surprisingly, many in Argentina appreciate this approach—and has helped rebuild trust with audiences, she said. “It makes us look less stuck-up. Some say we’re like friends giving updates.”

One of the fellows on the reporting tour, Eman Sobhy of Egypt, is actually a social media influencer herself. Though not a practicing journalist, she considers herself a storyteller, and her YouTube channel, “What If?” is hinged on simply asking hard questions that start with “What if?”

For the program’s duration, she did videos that explained America’s complex electoral system: “What if Trump wins?” “What if the US presidential election results take longer than overnight?”

The answers are never as simple as the questions, but it works for her over 819,000 subscribers.

Even though Sobhy was not a practitioner, she interrogated issues with the same journalistic lens as everyone else. She shared how she used to feel insecure until she realized she had a more potent form of storytelling.

Beyond ‘neutral’

Jean-Paul Ibambe, another Humphrey Fellow and practicing lawyer, said these patterns showed that old-school journalism—puritanical, traditional, and “neutral”—is no longer in vogue.

Now, he said, audiences “demand that we … build some bridges in a way that would still respect the format of journalism, but also provide the kind of content that people want.”

And what people want, Yancho said, “is edutainment.”

“They want to be informed, but they want to be engaged and entertaining at the same time. It’s combining strong journalistic principles and integrity with content that’s a little bit more engaging to a different audience that consumes that information differently,” he said.