Back in the 2010s, journalists and the legacy media outlets that employed them famously pivoted to video on digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In 2020, they pivoted to TikTok. As the world went into lockdown amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, the platform saw its audience skyrocket. And those incoming viewers proved particularly hungry for news—a hunger that news organizations and independent journalists alike were ready to feed.
But that feast appears ready to give way to famine. On Jan. 19, TikTok will likely go dark due to a bipartisan law passed by Congress mandating its sale from the China-owned ByteDance company. The Supreme Court issued a ruling on Friday upholding that law, which effectively bans TikTok in the U.S.
While news organizations themselves are likely to respond to the loss of TikTok by simply finding the next social media platform to share their content, the ban’s impact will be keenly felt among the writers and reporters who have integrated the platform—and its audience—into their storytelling. TVNewser spoke with three journalists about how they’ve used TikTok to build their audience and how they’re preparing for a post-TikTok media landscape.
Dave Jorgenson, senior video reporter for The Washington Post
As The Washington Post’s self-styled “Tik Tok Guy” (a label he proudly includes in his Bluesky bio), Dave Jorgensen remembers when he had to almost forcibly persuade his newsroom colleagues to join him on-camera back in 2020. “They had no idea what TikTok was,” he recalls with a laugh. “Maybe their reference was their nephew, but that was it.”
Nowadays, though, he has more booking requests than he can handle. “I can’t say yes to everyone,” he sighs, adding that he’s the go-to sounding board for Post journalists looking to experiment with social video on their own. “I do the best I can while still getting sleep!”
Being an early TikTok adopter helped Jorgenson build a dedicated audience that tune in for his humor-laden takes on news, as well as ongoing in-jokes and storylines involving expense reports and his resemblance to Vice President-elect JD Vance. (For the record, he’s not the Hillbilly Elegy author.) As the overseer of the so-called “Washington Post TikTok cinematic universe,” Jorgenson has seen his own TikTok account grow to over 52,000 followers, while the Washington Post boasts 1.8 million.
Now, as he waits to see what Jan. 19 might bring, Jorgenson says that he’s “at peace” with the idea that all those followers may scatter should the ban go forward. “It’s completely out of my control. But I’m excited as a reporter to cover it—this has actually been one of our highest-traffic weeks ever.”
