Introduction Blog Post

Hi! My name is Paloma and I’m an aspiring journalist at BIM! My senior project is about The Washington Post Shorts and the future of news media. While in Journalism class and working on the BIM Bulletin, I wondered if our articles would appeal to our school audience; mainly 12-19 year-olds who generally don’t read 2000-word articles in their spare time. The answer, based on the analytics, was clear. Not many people looked at our website. Most articles got about 25-35 views, with one outlier which got about 75 views. Later, that summer, I was able to attend the Washington Journalism and Media Conference, where I got to hear a talk from the CEO of the news platform AXIOS. He mentioned something that related to this. He told us: “Whenever you get high enough at a newspaper to see the analytics, you’ll see that they’re not doing so well”. Looking at the BIM Bulletin analytics, I discovered that we were experiencing the same thing, though on a far smaller scale. Therefore, I wanted to figure out how the media will have to change in order to adapt to this shift in consumer habits.

In the later end of March 2020, just as the pandemic started, an intern at the Washington Post by the name of Dave Jorgenson presented an idea to his higher ups. All newspapers had been seeing decline, and the Washington Post was no exception. The recent buyout by Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos was one of the few reasons they hadn’t shut down yet. However, the COVID-19 Pandemic brought the rise of Tiktok, the still popular short-form video platform. Jorgenson decided to go ahead and create a Tiktok account for the Washington Post, taking the daily news and creating short comedy reels in order to try to reach a younger, less engaged audience. This was an immediate success, especially with the massive spread of misinformation due to COVID. He then got two other employees, Carmella Boykin and Chris Vasquez, to join in, creating the official Washington Post Tiktok Team. They have now spread to other platforms like Instagram and Youtube, with plans to expand even further if that proves fruitful.

What had originally started with a Tik Tok account has now grown into Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts. Each one of their videos get millions of views and the account is well known and liked. What does this approach to news telling tell us? Has it benefited the Washington Post overall? How does this help figure out where journalism and news telling needs to go to remain relevant? Understanding how a lowly Tik tok account has managed to garner so much attention could be the key to understanding how to make the news remain on top and relevant. Hence, my senior project.

My internship is taking place online at Innocuous AI, a new AI Startup which is looking to help small businesses streamline their procedures. I’m going to be helping out as a media intern, making social media posts and helping figure out the logistics behind marketing. As with all the other senior projects, I’ll update my progress here each week, so keep posted to see what I start to uncover.