☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: Zohran Mamdani’s media strategy and campaign success
- New from Pew Research Center: Despite encountering paywalls, most Americans don’t pay for news
- In other news: Washington Post to pilot program allowing sources to annotate stories
- Looking ahead: TikTok aims to support news influencers
- Chart of the week: Americans who hit paywalls often try to find the information elsewhere
🔥 Featured story
Zohran Mamdani is the apparent winner of this week’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor, and some are connecting his success to his viral videos and use of new media. Mamdani has over 1 million followers on Instagram and hundreds of thousands on TikTok and X.
According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, about three-quarters of U.S. adults who use X (74%) say they see at least some content about politics on the site, as do 52% of Facebook users, 45% of TikTok users and 36% of Instagram users.
At 33 years old, Mamdani is close in age to a younger generation that is much more likely to get news on social media in general and on TikTok and Instagram in particular.
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
About three-quarters of Americans (74%) run into paywalls at least sometimes when they are looking for news online, including 38% who say they come across paywalled articles extremely often or often, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
At the same time, the vast majority of Americans (83%) say they have not paid for news in the past year. Within this group, the most common reasons people cite for not paying are that they can find plenty of other news articles for free (49%) or that they are not interested enough to pay (32%).
📌 In other news
- Washington Post to start pilot program allowing sources to annotate stories
- Trump administration terminates contracts with scientific publisher Springer Nature
- Media Matters sues Federal Trade Commission, alleging retaliation over reporting about extremist content on X
- German court lifts ban on magazine linked to far-right party
- A look at the Center for Investigative Reporting’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft
- How some journalists are transitioning from legacy media to independent journalism
- What Fox News hosts said ahead of U.S. strikes on Iran
- Wisconsin Public Radio announces layoffs, ends four programs
📅 Looking ahead
In an effort to support news influencers on the platform, TikTok is hiring a creator manager responsible for “managing and growing ‘News’ creators for North America.” The share of U.S. TikTok users who regularly get news on the platform has grown rapidly in recent years. About half of all U.S. adults who use TikTok (52%) say they regularly get news there, according to a 2024 survey, up from 22% in 2020.
Roughly three-in-ten news influencers (27%) are on TikTok, according to 2024 Center study that analyzed a sample of 500 news influencers identified on five major social media sites. News influencers on TikTok differ in some ways from those on Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube. For instance, TikTok is the only site of the five studied where news influencers who explicitly identify as right-leaning do not outnumber those who are explicitly left-leaning.
Dive deeper into the data on Americans’ experiences with news on TikTok.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart comes from the Center’s new survey on paywalls. Among U.S. adults who say they ever come across paywalls when looking for news online, 53% report that their first response is typically to look for the information elsewhere – and about a third (32%) say they give up on trying to access the information. Just 1% say their first reaction is to pay for access to the article.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Jacob Liedke, Christopher St. Aubin, Luxuan Wang and Emily Tomasik. It is edited by Michael Lipka and copy edited by Anna Jackson.
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