On a recent Wednesday in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood, former CBS, Bloomberg News, and Fox News producer Moshe Oyenownow swiped through Instagram. He had been reading major newspapers and about a dozen newsletters since morning. He then spent most of his day posting many articles to his Instagram account under the handle Mo News.
A Wall Street Journal article about aging Americans was relayed through a photo of a cake proclaiming, “A record number of Americans turning 65 this year are wealthy, active, and single.” . Oinounou, an affable 41-year-old, occasionally appears on camera with his daily news podcast co-hosts to explain the importance of how Republican presidential candidates vote and why President Biden is his supporter. there were. New Hampshire candidate.
This content has helped Mo News gain 436,000 Instagram followers, transform it from a pandemic side project into a company with three full-time employees, and garner more attention. In December, the State Department offered Mo News an interview with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Oynow said his agency told him: “We understand how people get their news.”
“People are very critical and cynical of the information that comes from traditional sources,” Oinounou said in an interview. “I feel sympathy for this person who is reporting the news on Instagram.”
Oinounou is one of the prominent figures who has figured out how to package and distribute information to Instagram, turning the social platform increasingly into a news force. Mirroring the way older generations used their Facebook, many Millennials and their Gen I started to feel reluctant to repost.
Traditional news outlets like the New York Times have large Instagram feeds where they share their reporting, but these news accounts have a different appeal that has become more prominent in recent years.
They curate their content like traditional blogs and speak to the camera like TikTok or YouTube influencers. They source headlines from many major media outlets and add their own analysis. Interact with your followers through comments and direct messages, and use their feedback and questions to create additional posts. Many pledge to be nonpartisan.
“For many people, there are chefs they trust, doctors they trust, and even categories of news and information they trust,” says Jessica Yellin, a former White House correspondent for CNN. Yellin, who has more than 650,000 followers on her Instagram news account and media brand News Not Noise, calls herself an “information encoder.”
For this reason, Instagram, which is owned by Meta, has become an increasingly important news outlet in this year's U.S. presidential election. As of last year, 16% of U.S. adults regularly got news on Instagram, up from 8% in 2018, more than TikTok, X and Reddit, according to Pew Research. More than half of that group were women.
News influencers are gaining popularity on Instagram, even as the platform tries to keep political content out of the picture. Instagram and its sister platform Facebook have been plagued by accusations of spreading misinformation and inciting political debate. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, was negative about the app partnering with or promoting news accounts.
Mosseri said earlier this month that Instagram would no longer encourage “political content” in various parts of the app unless users choose to display it. The platform said political content includes posts that “may relate to law, elections, social topics, etc.”
In the week following Mosseri's announcement, news accounts saw a decline in shares, comments, likes, reach and video views, according to an analysis by social media management firm Dash Hudson. According to the company, the average share of posts from 70 major news accounts on Instagram, including The Times and NPR, decreased by 26% from the previous week.
In protest, Yellin made a video condemning Instagram's changes and wrote in the Newsletter that the move “inevitably impacts voter information, media, and even democracy.” “This could have far-reaching implications for the future of the doctrine.”
An Instagram spokesperson declined to comment beyond Mosseri's statement. Mosseri has previously praised the work of some news influencers. He follows his Mo News paid subscribers only account on his Instagram.
Other prominent news influencers on Instagram include Sharon McMahon, 46, a former high school teacher in Duluth, Minnesota. He has amassed more than 1 million followers by explaining the basics of government. Some are more overtly political, like Emily Amick, 39, a lawyer with more than 134,000 followers. In other news, his accounts include Roca News, founded by a young man in his 20s who sees Instagram as an important way to reach out to his peers who feel alienated from traditional news organizations .
McMahon said she was inspired to start her Instagram news account after seeing misinformation leading up to the 2020 election. She recently posted a graph on her Instagram account obtained from Customs and Border Protection about migrant encounters at the U.S. southern border, which received more than 30,000 likes and a top candidate. He also posted an interview with a Democratic representative from Minnesota, Rep. Dean Phillips. To President Biden.
“I don't really think of myself as a journalist, but more like a teacher,” McMahon said. “I'm getting the scoop and explaining what's going on, rather than digging up stories and creating sources.”
Instagram is a starting point for expanding into newsletters and podcasts, and your account can earn money from ads and subscriptions. Many news influencers also accept paid sponsorships that they incorporate into their Instagram posts. Ms. McMahon runs a private book club for subscribers with a waiting list and offers paid video workshops to learn about government and current political issues.
Yellin, a former CNN correspondent, started posting news on Instagram in 2018 around the time of Brett M. Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings at the Supreme Court. She posted explainers during the Trump administration, explaining to people what happened at her hearings and defining terms like sanctions against her supporters.
Yellin's rise has been helped by celebrity fans such as Jessica Seinfeld and Amy Schumer. Seinfeld, who has about 600,000 followers on Instagram, discovered Yellin's news account and urged people to follow him.
“My idea was that we could involve people who avoid the news, and we could also involve people who are partly paying attention to the news, but who are panicked by the news.” , said Yellin, who has five full-time and part-time employees.
Delivering news on Instagram, her ethos is summed up in her tagline: “We deliver information, not panic attacks.”
Last year, when the White House held its first holiday party for internet influencers, Oinounou, Yellin and Amick were invited. White House Digital Strategy Office Director Christian Thom, who helped the party come up with the idea, said the administration regularly works with Instagram news accounts.
“There are many accounts that share news and information, and their viewers may not be hearing anything from the White House or may not be following the White House at all,” he said.
Tom pointed to Instagram-first news brands like @Impact and @Betches_News, meme and entertainment accounts like @Pubity, and progressive media publications like MeidasTouch and A More Perfect Union.
“Each generation creates these tools and uses them in their own way,” he said.
Even though Instagram changes its news content, users will still be able to see news through accounts they already follow and stories from their friends.
“It seems like everyone has become a broadcaster and a source of information for their friends and family,” Oinounou said.
Amick said she has seen her peers gravitate to Instagram for news because “social media apps are stratified by generation.” She considers herself more of a “general opinion editor,” rather than a news source like Mo News or Mr. Yellin, and uses Instagram to talk about issues like reproductive rights among millennial women. I think it's a place to mobilize people.
“My friends who are millennial moms are busy. They have jobs, they have kids, they have to put food on the table,” she said. “They don't have a lot of extra time to read news and were already on Instagram. So this is a way to allow them to consume news through the modalities they already use. ”
