Gen Z loves the newspaper (on TikTok)
Kelsey Russell gets millions of views reading ‘The New York Times.’
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Yesterday, I filled in on The Guardian’s TechScape newsletter, writing about how TikTok’s rise spelled the death of the rest of social media. You can read that here, and sign up for TechScape here! —Kate
I can, and have, dedicated thousands of words to Gen Z’s media literacy problem. But you can shout about algorithms, social media clickbait, and the decline of cable news giving way to the rise of influencers until you're blue in the face—none of that matters unless you have a plan for what to do about it. While we’ve been wringing our hands, Gen Z has taken matters into their own.
I came across 23-year-old Kelsey Russell on TikTok while she was doing something decidedly un-TikTok-y: reading the New York Times out loud. There was no dancing, no suspenseful music, not even much editing, but she was still drawing audiences of ten thousand, fifty thousand, even one million viewers—numbers that some news outlets themselves only dream of seeing on Chartbeat.
“I did not realize that years ago Colombia forged a peace agreement, and they’ve just been using Ecuador to traffic drugs,” she exclaimed in an August 23 video about crime and violence in Ecuador. “That’s not cool, bro!”
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Kelsey’s videos work thanks to her sincere and enthusiastic demeanor and the natural and entertaining way that she breaks down complicated stories. She has been invited to tour the New York Times office and is now being wooed by The Washington Post. Before she started reading the news on TikTok, Kelsey found some success with videos helping Black people find their community in Boston (she recommended salons, nightlife destinations, and more). For her 23rd birthday, she asked her parents to get her a subscription to The New York Times, one of the papers her family read when she was growing up. Now she’s getting her master’s in sociology and education at Columbia University.
“I love to go out, so I think it's important that you're doing the other brain work for the brain cells that I'm killing on the weekends,” she joked when we hopped on Zoom. What followed is one of my favorite conversations that I’ve had with a creator for this newsletter. In this interview for paid subscribers, Kelsey shares her insights as to what went wrong with Gen Z and news and why print might actually be the solution to Gen Z’s news aversion. And shoutout to
’s who nabbed an interview with Kelsey last week!
In the first video of yours I saw, you said a reason you were making these videos is that Gen Z has a media literacy problem. Why do you think that?
The biggest problem, first, is that we are just an anxious generation. And I think that that's a hard one to fight because we're a generation where we had social media in middle school, elementary school, depending on where you are. So we're already more anxiety-prone. So I think what we tend to do is we're avoidant. So when we see something that we know is going to cause us an emotion that we don't wanna deal with, we will just obliterate it. But because we live in a world that feeds so much anxiety, I think it causes folks to become way too avoidant.
The next thing is that we are a phone-driven generation, so it's natural that we're gonna go to our phone for information. What's not natural is for you to consume that there's a school shooting, and then your best friend bent over posting her weekend, and then [an article] from CNN that Hawaii's burning. That's what's not normal. That is not okay. And that's too much for your brain to handle and regulate. "How do I actually feel about Hawaii burning? That made me sad. Let me go do something that makes me happy." That's the part that's missing is like, what do you do with those emotions?
And then how about the fact that nobody on our TV is our age? Like I would love to watch CNN if a graduate student was on there and sharing their perspective. We wanna hear people use our colloquial language in the news. So I would say it's those three things that I see.
When you asked for a subscription for your birthday, why did you pick the New York Times?
I turned to it 'cause I'm comfortable with it. And that's my biggest thing is someone who is in education, you learn what you're comfortable with. They don't teach babies letters and numbers and colors all on the same day. You go in increments. SoI have a comfort zone. And by using the New York Times, I'm able to step out more into different papers. Like, The Washington Post sent me something, and I can't stand politics and policy, but because I have a better comfort with just the newspaper in general, I'm like, "Okay, I can tackle this and understand it better."
You're reading the newspaper on TikTok, and while hearing that sentence doesn't necessarily sound like it's the most exciting thing, it's really taken off. What has the response been like and why do you think it's working?
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I can't tell the ages of folks who are responding, but I do know a lot of journalists are like, "Thank you for saving my job." There's journalists that are so grateful and thankful and also like, "Could you please read my article?" That's showing me that there's a lack of space for writers to get their content out there and communicate. So that's what I'm noticing. You also have a lot of people my age that are like, “Oh, I'm gonna subscribe to the paper.” I'm seeing a lot of that. I've also had a lot of teachers reach out to me, like one teacher, she creates a content creator list for her students. I thought that was so cool. And she was like, “I wanna put you on the list.”
I'm also seeing this response of educators where they're expressing that the lack of media literacy is affecting their classrooms. And by having somebody on TikTok communicate it, it's a great medium for their students. And then also critique, but I love critique. I have a lot of folks who are like, “You said that country incorrectly.” Like, I remember I was saying "the Ukraine" instead of Ukraine. I have some people who are like, "Hey, can you please gimme the page numbers?" So through the people it's like, “Cool, thank you for critiquing me so I could deliver this information as concise as possible.”
I'm thinking about what you were saying earlier about seeing an article, your friend on a night out, and then horrible news. And print allows for you to take a slower moment to just sit with it. It's an interesting response in such a social media world because I feel like the biggest thing that's been plaguing the news industry is that print is in decline. So to hear it used in that way is super interesting.
Listen, I didn't know it could even be used that way, but as someone who deals with anxiety—like, I've been in therapy for I guess two years. Anxious people love organization. So what I see is like, okay, I love Instagram. I love taking pictures of myself, but that is for a certain moment of time. You, as a human, it's up to you how you want to consume your news. And I just want people to consume it in a safe space for them, and that they don't have to worry about like their friend in Ibiza. It's too much!
Twitter is a garbage fire, Instagram is hard to link, and so a lot of journalists are turning to TikTok, but that requires being comfortable on video, which is really hard. I think maybe people who are less comfortable with it are like, "Can you do it? Can you read my story?"
I so hear you. I went to the Westminster Schools in Atlanta and we had this thing called JanTerm. And for the first three weeks of January, we took the same class. And it was in different types of industries. I think my 10th grade year, I took one in journalism 'cause I was like, "I wanna be on TV." And I was like, "Oh hell no. This is too much writing." I was like, absolutely not. I didn't know I was gonna have to write like a journalist to be on TV.
So it's interesting 'cause a lot of the things that the writers do, I have so much respect for them because as a writer myself, I'm more of an academic writer, which is a completely different style than journalistic writing. So I think what we're also seeing is that there's all of these great writers with great information, but they don't want to have an online presence. And I think that's kind of where I'm able to come in is that I love being in front of a camera. I like communicating things in funny ways for folks to understand. So I hear exactly what you're saying. I want to support journalists in that. You guys have amazing things to say, I can just communicate it. I'm so down to do that.
As you're sitting down and reading these stories, probably stories you wouldn't normally read because they aren't things that you would click on if they showed up on your feed, are there things that you've learned? Either about the news business or about the world in general?
Oh my gosh. Yeah. So going to the New York Times and seeing their museum was very fascinating. Part one, I did not know they were family-owned. So I did not know that a lot of these newspapers are birthed out of families. That's been the biggest thing. And also just really understanding who owns our media has probably been one of the biggest things I've learned. There's a lack of transparency in what it means that Jeff Bezos owns the Post. We have to critically think that like the Post reported on the Pentagon papers, on Watergate, like this was a newspaper that made us question the government. And now somebody that the government can't even handle owns the Post.
Reading the news out on TikTok is one method of disrupting Gen Z's weird news environment. Are there any other changes you think could help longer-term?
I think the best thing is to look at is history. Like what has worked the best to communicate news? And my biggest standouts are Wendy Williams and Oprah, two totally separate people. I think it helps to have a couple of point people that have personalities, that have the knowledge, that have the ability to communicate information and have a platform, so that's one thing. I think another way we can see media change in the future is just, let's get somebody to interview Anderson Cooper and ask how he interviews these people, right? Why can't someone Gen Z interview Diane Sawyer? Also we're in a time of nostalgia. So I think it's a great time to capitalize on that, but we do it in a way that also brings in the solutions to some of the problems it caused.
My last question: You're in school and it sounds like you wanna go into education. How does this tie into your future plans once you're out of school?
I actually had my first day in class yesterday and I felt for the first time I really knew what I was learning. I've been in school for six years. I'm in an introduction to education policy and my professor was talking about this idea of a policy window—like, decades ago you changed policy because all of the news was focused on one thing and people were outraged. But now policy windows are so narrow it's hard to make change. It's like, “Oh, whoa. What I'm doing is kind of making that policy window.”
My goal is to be a college president one day. I've always wanted to blend education and entertainment, whether that's being in front of a classroom, teaching them something that's exciting, whether that's me being a provost, whether it's running my own education consulting firm, maybe being more in entertainment, like having a podcast, a TV show. But making sure whatever I'm doing in education is entertaining, and whatever I'm doing in entertainment is educational.