Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst has his routine down when reporting from Tel Aviv, or Kyiv, or Beirut: He clears his throat, looks into the camera and records a segment for the news network. Then he reaches for his phone and records another for TikTok.
“By using social media, I’m able to connect with a younger audience that may not traditionally be watching cable news and get them interested in the stories that we’re telling,” said Yingst, who is 31.
Fox’s TV audience has a median age of 69. Yingst is mainly targeting those viewers’ children and grandchildren with his short selfie-style videos. He has more than 852,000 TikTok followers, nearly half as many as the cable network’s account.
Legacy media companies are facing a tough reality: 39% of adults under 30 say they regularly get their news on TikTok, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Some of the biggest news outlets are trying to follow this audience onto the platform—and other social-media spots with large young followings—but can struggle to gain traction through their main branded accounts. TikTok users are drawn to engaging individuals, regardless of who employs them, or even whether they work for a news organization.
In October and November, 88 of the top 150 political TikTok accounts in the U.S. were content creators, according to data from CredoIQ, a social-media research firm. Fifty-one were publishers like the New York Times , MSNBC, Fox and CNN, while the rest were associated with candidates or political parties.
Fox News joined TikTok in June and is tapping talent like Yingst, “Fox & Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt and senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy to reach young people there.
One clip of Doocy asking the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to assess how awkward things were between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris after the vice president’s election loss garnered 2.4 million views.
Fox News parent Fox Corp. and The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, News Corp , share common ownership.
Media companies are making bets on TikTok at a time when the future of the platform itself is in question. A federal appeals court earlier this month said Congress does have the power to shut down the Chinese-backed app, though that decision is likely to be appealed.
The platform doesn’t generate much ad revenue for publishers or news networks, but executives say it’s worth investing in as a longer-term play. Even if young adults aren’t signing up for TV packages or news services now, the companies believe they can cultivate them as future customers by engaging on TikTok.
“When the kids have good jobs or they want deeper information, then a subscription to The Wall Street Journal is just a click away,” said Freddy Tran Nager , associate director of the digital social media master’s degree program at the University of Southern California.
NBCUniversal’s brands lean into personalities like NBC News national political correspondent Steve Kornacki , and “Today” co-hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager , who have gained a following for lighthearted celebrity interviews. An NBC News TikTok of Kornacki breaking down why Donald Trump won in Wisconsin while the state elected a Democrat as senator garnered 1.2 million views.
“If you want to reach young people, you don’t have to be a version of Joe Rogan ,” said Chris Berend , NBCUniversal News Group’s chief digital officer. “We’ve proven that we can reach hundreds of millions of people by being ourselves and just having distinctive voices.”
MSNBC ranked third in CredoIQ’s ranking of the top 150 political TikTok accounts in October and November, behind the Trump team and the Daily Mail’s accounts. NBC News ranked 10th.
Berend said that personality-driven clips can play well on TikTok and said, “The mistake is when you assume that everything you produce on television could go on TikTok.”
“60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl recently had a piece on “CBS News Sunday Morning” discussing how Parkinson’s patients are tackling symptoms by rock climbing. For a CBS News TikTok, she spoke to the camera about how boxing helped her husband while he battled Parkinson’s. The video has garnered half a million views.
“We know that social algorithms and consumers have come to prefer the style of creator content over the style of traditional brand content,” said Christina Capatides , vice president of social media and trending content for CBS News and stations.
Earlier this month, CBS News foreign correspondent Ramy Inocencio recorded a TikTok while at London’s Heathrow Airport—and while on a plane to Seoul—taking viewers through South Korea’s brush with martial law. It attracted 3.3 million views.
“When you’re on the news, they’re reading from a script,” said Chelsey Cheraru , a 27-year-old stay-at-home mom who lives in southeast Michigan. “When you’re on someone’s TikTok live or you’re watching someone’s video, nine out of 10 times they’re not reading a script.”
She turned to TikTok when following news of Hurricane Milton earlier this year, “to see people’s live and raw reactions to it because I feel like that’s real news.”
Reaching young viewers in a fun and engaging way is top of mind for Dave Jorgenson , who has run the Washington Post’s TikTok account since 2019.
Jorgenson recently played both the Post’s editorial board (wearing a polo shirt, seated at a computer) and owner Jeff Bezos (button-down shirt, loose necktie) for a clip riffing on the owner’s controversial decision not to run an endorsement in the presidential election.
Jorgenson pulled language from the Washington Post article on the matter, explaining why billionaires like Bezos might be concerned about retribution from Trump.
“I know exactly where the line is as far as humor goes,” he said. “I really try to go up to it without going over it.”
At the New York Times, recent TikTok posts include clips about the renovated Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, a fashion editor discussing the most stylish people of 2024 and part of Jeff Bezos’ interview at the DealBook Summit.
“The strategy is, be ourselves but in all the places that we want to reach people and not bend over backward to make things that only work for a particular platform,” said Anna Dubenko , the Times’s director of audience.
Dubenko said the Times doesn’t explicitly encourage or train reporters to share their work on the platform.
The Wall Street Journal said it is working to engage younger audiences across platforms, including on TikTok. Its videos mainly feature reporters breaking down their stories on topics ranging from Trump’s plans to remake the education system to the declining value of credit card points .
Nager, from USC, said he likes to see individuals highlighted in the posts.
“You can’t just repurpose content from, say, your newspaper website and just bring it over to TikTok and hope it’ll have the same impact,” he said. “I would say that all these news organizations need to add a face to the brand.”
Write to Isabella Simonetti at isabella.simonetti@wsj.com
