Vertical Journalism: The Future of News?

Leah Dajches: If you're like me, you might use TikTok for things like finding silly cat videos, interesting and easy recipes, or even the latest news on Taylor Swift. But would I, a media scholar, use it for a news source? Well, maybe. As the song goes, the times, they are a changing. If you need proof, look no further than the fact that the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the Canadian News Conglomerate, hired its first TikTok lead.

Matt Jordan: Enrique Anarte is a Spanish multimedia journalist based in Berlin. Before joining the Thomson Reuters Foundation as its first TikTok lead, Anarte reported for DW, Reuters, NBC, EFE, and other Spanish media outlets. He has covered politics and human rights topics from over 10 countries and currently focuses on LGBTQ+ stories in multiple formats for Openly, Thomson Reuters Foundation's, Queer News Vertical. He recently became an ambassador for the US based Poynter Institute's MediaWise initiative to foster media literacy and tackle misinformation. We'll talk with him about how and why he's using TikTok to reach a varied news averse demographic. Enrique, welcome to News Over Noise.

Enrique Anarte: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Leah Dajches: Of course. Well, we'll jump right in. And so, I saw that you were recently featured by Nieman Lab in which they mentioned that you first began creating TikToks for fun in 2020 during the pandemic. And I'm curious, as I'm sure some of our other listeners will be, is to know a little bit more about your background and how you got into journalism.

Enrique Anarte: So, I'm from Spain, and I—my first work as a journalist was for Germany's international broadcaster DW. I moved from Spain to Germany for that after a few internships. And I used to be a tech reporter mostly writing about human rights and politics in Latin America. But that changed completely when the pandemic came and suddenly, the broadcaster, as many other media companies around the world, I guess, needed young people to step in with the new social formats that were emerging and were a great way to reach people while they were not able to produce traditional TV content or TV shows because of the social distancing rules. That was my specific experience and how I got from traditional text reporting into TikTok. And it’s crazy creativity and way of reaching people.

Matt Jordan: Enrique, explain the work of Openly. Why was it created and what's the mission?

Enrique Anarte: So Openly is the LGBTQ++ news brands of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The Thomson Reuters Foundation is Reuters corporate foundation, and we produce impartial journalism following Reuters standards on some key issues that affect society today, including climate change, the impact of technology, and inclusive economies, and also LGBTQ++ rights. And I think what makes Openly different to other queer news platforms is that we produce impartial journalism in these issues for the platforms that we're in. So, we have our own website where we produce our story. But also, in 2021, we launched on TikTok where we were hoping—and I think we've succeeded at doing that, produce impartial journalism on LGBTQ++ issues in a way that feels native to the users of that platform. And that fills the gap in the way they receive information about those issues.

Matt Jordan: When you say impartial, what do you mean by that?

Enrique Anarte: That's a good question. So, we don't do what many would see as activist journalism. We don't campaign. We don't advocate for specific laws, parties, policies that affect the LGBTQ+ community. We are unbiased, as Reuters is, and we are independent. And that's, I think, what we mean by our impartiality. To me, impartiality does not only mean getting both sides, but it means adding the context, especially with these issues where there's so much misinformation. And right now, with the internet and social platforms, with algorithms exponentially delivering this misinformation sometimes. For us, or at least for me, this impartiality that we take from Reuters journalistic values means not only getting both sides of the story, which not all queer news outlets will get, I guess. But also, adding the context that allows readers to actually understand an issue and form their own opinion about it.

Leah Dajches: This might be getting a smidge into the weeds, but we actually—we spoke with journalist Louis Raven Wallace during our first season about objectivity. And so, I'm wondering in this situation you're talking about impartial news, is that equated to objectivity or only because we unpack this quote that objectivity is the ideology of the status quo? And so, there's been a lot of I think conversations around objectivity or both sides as sometimes silencing marginalized communities or misrepresenting those identities. And so, I'm just curious if you ever grapple with this tension if objectivity is what you mean by impartial or not?

Enrique Anarte: I mean, this definitely is an issue that we deal with every day. And I think it is an important issue and one that we should keep having conversations about. I'm not really sure whether objectivity and impartiality are the same. I think we sometimes focus a lot on these definitions. And it's not that much about how we define these intangible terms but how we practice journalism. To me—and I can give you an example, if we don't talk about LGBTQ+ issues but we talk about climate change, you will never interview someone that denies climate change and someone that says that climate change is real. You will always say the scientific community overwhelmingly agrees that climate change is real. That is what I think we try to do with LGBTQ+ issues. Some people say that the rights of the community threaten all people while advocates say they don't. And then there's a lot of international experience and international lessons that we can draw from other countries as you can—I think you can see it very well with our reporting on self-determination or self ID laws in Europe, which have become one of the most polarized and controversial conversations around queer rights in Europe. But we try to do very often is not just say, trans advocates say they're good and those that campaign against trans rights say they're bad. But we look at the countries where they have been in place for over 10 years, and what are the lessons there? That's what we did with Argentina, for example, whose self ID law turned 10 last year. So, if this law is bad, if self-determination is bad, then what has happened there? Has it actually affected other people? And I think that that is what—and obviously, it's not always so easy to see. But I think the practice of impartiality is closer to that than to actually defining or finding this intangible definition of what either objectivity or impartiality is. But so basically, getting what all the different sides say, but providing the context, in this case, the international context. That allows us as journalists, but mostly the audience, to form their own opinion on the topic.

Matt Jordan: That's really interesting. I noticed you also work with Context News, which is another Thomson Reuters platform. And so, tell me how you would take a story like the one you're just describing then and with a lot of context and turn it into a 30 second TikTok.

Enrique Anarte: Yeah. [LAUGHS] So that's a challenge, I guess. Context is our—how would you say that in English? Like a sibling brand. So, context covers climate change, the impact of tech in society, and inclusive economies, and Openly covers LGBTQ+ rights. When it comes to short form video and any kind of short format, there is a challenge of, how do you include all the sides there? To me, I think the key is in understanding what are different possibilities that the platform gives you to include information and how the user behaves in them. So if you have the possibility to speak but at the same time you can have text on camera, and then you also have a description or caption for the video, and then you also have the possibility to add information in the comments, the action or the journalistic action of providing context, I think, is mostly related to using all these different possibilities. So you do not only—let's say if you say, for example, Russia has passed a law that bans propaganda not only among minors but also among adults because they say that it threatens traditional values, and then you need to include a lot of the voices of the people who are affected by this law, but also what the EU and the US or the United Nations say about that. I think all these different features, either text on camera, the description—also now, for example, TikTok updated—I think it has been working towards making it—giving us as journalists a lot of more possibilities to do this by making captions longer. By using all these native features of the platform has to add extra information, even if it's not necessarily only included in what you are saying in your script. Does that make sense?

Matt Jordan: Yeah.

Leah Dajches: Yeah, absolutely. I'm wondering, so is this starting to dabble in the idea of vertical journalism or is this something completely different? I noticed that you were—you hosted a workshop on vertical journalism. And we talk a lot about journalistic trends on the podcast. So, are you able to explain what vertical journalism is or how it might differ from what you've been mentioning with TikTok?

Enrique Anarte: I think the conversation should abandon the angle of TikTok journalism and go towards vertical video. Because in the end, what we have seen is that the success of TikTok revolutionized the world of how we give users information on social platforms. And we saw how Instagram and YouTube adopted—copied, basically, the model of TikTok with YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Facebook reels now. And we basically can do the same things that we do on TikTok. Even some features that were very specific to the platform like the stitch feature where you basically take a cut from a video, and you glue your own video onto that part of the first video. Instagram copied the—and YouTube also I think copied that same feature. So, I don't think it makes sense to talk about TikTok journalism anymore or TikTok formats. The TikTok algorithm has some specificities, and I think it has a potential very often to take things much further away. And by things, I mean like videos by people that do not have that many followers, and that was the point of TikTok from the beginning. You can go viral even if you don't have one million followers. But in the end, what we have seen and what I see on my personal channel where I produce journalistic content or what we have seen on Openly is that the same video sometimes does much better on Instagram Reels than it does on TikTok. So, what is the point of talking about a TikTok format when actually, exactly the same video with the same text inserts, with the same—it is the same video, which is posted the same video with the same subtitles, the same text inserts is doing far better on Instagram, or sometimes is doing well on Instagram while it flopped on TikTok? Yeah. I just think that it makes much more sense to try to understand how one can produce journalism in this vertical video format. And mostly what I try to remind anyone that I work with or that I try to teach something to how people consume information. Because I think that's the beauty of this TikTok revolution. That we're not any more in charge of who gets what. We don't get to decide because we have one million followers what does well. It's more like—which is dangerous. The algorithm decides that. But at the same time, it gives a lot of—in our case, for example, marginalized voices the possibility to get much further than established media platforms. We are a very small newsroom. But also, for small creators who are trying to report on stuff that maybe traditional media houses are not that interested in, this gives them a power that they didn't have before, which I think in many senses is more Democratic than a follower-based news distribution. And we can talk about how the algorithm is also tricky and it's not ideal. But I think if they share something all these things, all these platforms is that in order to succeed, we need to understand how people consume our video content. And if we don't, then it's just not going to work.

Matt Jordan: It's interesting. From the Pew Center Polling and whatnot it does seem like young people in general are getting their news from different vertical platforms, whether it's TikTok or Instagram Reels or Face—probably not Facebook, but all of these platforms together. How has the industry responded to that? Have you seen resistance at Reuters to using this platform? Because I think print journalism has a tendency to want to see these things as competition for what it's doing whereas it sounds like what you're doing is more as an additive or as an additive another way to get the news out.

Enrique Anarte: Well, I can't really speak for Reuters because we're not the same because the Thomson Reuters Foundation is independent from Reuters in that sense, as in editorially. But I can speak for us. I think we just from the very beginning, we're talking about mid 2021 before everyone decided to open a TikTok account, tried to—or understood and tried to find our way around that. The way people consume information on social media was just different. And a lot of legacy media outlets had just lost— and that's I guess the key issue to me, the trust of the audience. What's happening right now in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, I think, shows how important this trust issue is. And with a lot of—if you see the comments on the videos, it's all about how they've lost—how a lot of people on one side or another have lost the trust in established media outlets. So, I think for us at Openly and more recently at Context, it was about— we just have to be—if we're not there, someone is going to provide this information. And we cannot guarantee that these—other people that will be here have the same journalistic values as we do when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. These values fight against misinformation, accuracy, impartiality. And we keep seeing how state actors or private actors try to push misinformation targets in this community online. So, I think for us, it was like, it is a time to gain the trust of those people. And we can only do it by producing journalism that feels close to them and mostly that doesn't speak down to them and doesn't tell them any more, hey, we know what's true. We know what's good for you. We know what you should be watching. But a more humble attitude as journalists as to like, hey, we're here. We're a small newsroom. Here's how we fact check things. Here are the sources we look at. We make mistakes sometimes. Apologies for that. We interact with our audience when our audience asks us, can you cover what's happening in Greece right now? And we reply with a video to the comments. I think in the long run—and those are ways—I think you can't do everything. You can't change the world, but you can do small things to make things better. And I think in the long run, we have seen that a brand—a news brand that no one knew, that very few people knew—I think Openly had 20,000, 25,000 followers on Twitter. And they were mostly not gen-z. And right now, we have a lot of—I think 230,000 followers, mostly gen-z and young millennials who trust us to get their queer news from around the world—in the US and the UK, but also increasingly in the Global South, which is incredibly important for us as the Thomson Reuters Foundation. So yeah, I don't know if I answered your question. I think that go very long. [LAUGHS]

Matt Jordan: And very interesting too. But I think one thing—what I was—what I'm interested in knowing is that we see so much denigration of this kind of journalism by traditional legacy media. And do you think that the industry in general is turning to embrace it or are they resisting it because they haven't figured out how to monetize it yet? I mean, what do you see going on in that space?

Enrique Anarte: Yeah. There are different dimensions to your question because the issue of monetization is very different to the issue of embracing these formats. And I always—because I think that privilege is about acknowledging your privileges. I think that we have one privilege that is that even though we are a very small newsroom and there's only a very small amount of things that we can do daily or weekly or monthly, we also have the privilege of not having to make money. We are a nonprofit.

So, we don't need to, let's say, monetize, in a traditional way, our journalistic output, which is very different to the situation of the Washington Post or among our competitors, for example, PinkNews. They need to find a way to make it worth it in terms of their financial strategy. Otherwise, they cannot finance their TikTok teams or at least their video teams if they don't have a specific TikTok team.

I think when I first started, I kept hearing again and again, this saying of, that's not journalism. [? Not ?] the Thomson Reuters foundation. But from other places, I kept hearing this. And it was again and again. And I was always sure that we were doing the right thing because when I started doing journalism, I heard the same about Instagram, that it was not a place for news. And it was exactly the same—[? more than. ?] And I was like, this feels familiar. I've heard this before. So, I knew that we were right. At least we were not smarter than everyone, but we were right in that platforms are not just—are not places to do journalism. They're just platforms it's up to you to decide what you put out there and how you do it.

And I think a lot of resistance is because of the issue that many outlets do not or haven't really had, until very recently, an audience focused way of delivering news. As in they had their own big followings. They had already their big audiences that bought the newspaper, found the stories in the newspaper. So, they didn't have to think about—all the people were just watching the TV. So, they didn't have to think about, how do I reach people? What kind of content do I compete with? How do I make my story relevant among a sea of thirst traps and cat videos and celebrities talking about who they just went out with? That might sound very stupid, but it is the reality of social platforms. How do you make yourself relevant? And how do you make people care after a long day of work in a world that feels, by the hour, more and more depressing? How do you make them care about stories that matter and how do you tell serious stories in a way that they just don't make people more depressed and more anxious about the world? This is very tied to how people talk about solutions journalism. Not just tell about—not just talk about how bad the world is, but what are the initiatives or the people or the communities that are making things differently that are giving us a window into how things could be different? I think that there was a lot of resistance at first because things have changed a lot in the way—not only when it comes to TikTok, but they just have changed a lot in the way we deliver the news or the information that we want to deliver, the stories that we want to tell. And there's a lot of fear out there, but there's also a lot of possibilities to tell stories. And I think here with a podcast, or on YouTube for long form content, or on websites with data visualization, on Instagram with like posts with either with written information or visualized information. I don't think we thought we would be able to tell information like that five years ago. Vertical video is just another way of telling information, and it isn't even one way. There are many ways within this umbrella of vertical video. What we do is very different to what some of our competitors do to what the BBC does. And that's great. It's not about everyone doing the same. It's about us building and developing our smaller or bigger communities online and rebuild and trust in the media, that trust has been lost. For several reasons, if there is no trust, then I don't want to think about what the world will look like if there's no trust in the media.

Leah Dajches: So, it's interesting because you've mentioned a couple of times how you're part of a small newsroom. But something that is so cool about Openly's work is that it really takes a global perspective in covering LGBTQ+ stories. And I'm wondering if you think there's something unique to this beat—I don't know if that's what you would call it, or LGBTQ+ narratives, or storytelling, that allows for this really international focus?

Enrique Anarte: I mean, there is also a strategy to that. As in we know we're very small. And we cannot compete with newsrooms that only do queer news that are much bigger and that can post 10 videos a day. Logically, they will have a much bigger following and a much bigger community online. So, there is also—I can acknowledge that there is a strategy to try to do what other people do not do. Also, because I personally—and I think when it comes to the reason why the Thomson Reuters Foundation exists is to tell those stories that Reuters or other media outlets are not telling by focusing on these beats. But I do think that when it comes to LGBTQ+ news, the queer community has always found a safe space online. The asexual flag was created in an online forum. But a lot of asexual people, they didn't know each other. And they just started discussing, should we have a flag? And then they had their own voting system where they organized online. And I think that's just a very specific and weird and random, but good example of how the internet has weirdly created a lot of unity for queer people around the world that, in very different contexts and with very different lived experiences, find unity in connecting with other people and connecting with stories that are inspiring or worry them. And I think—I don't have empirical data on this, but I would not be surprised if someone once proved that actually weirdly queer people care a lot about queer rights in other countries more than in other communities. I don't know if I explained myself well. And I think it's because of this sense of online community, which is questionable and debatable, the whole concept of community. But I do think that there is a big dimension of how the internet has created this sense of unity among queer people that have very different experiences and that, in real life, they might not necessarily feel close to each other. Because in the end, when you talk about queer community, you're just talking about a lot of different people that have a lot of different priorities.

Leah Dajches: Yeah. That's really interesting. So actually, as a queer media scholar, a lot of my work looks at online entities as forms of social support and spaces for people to find individuals like them. And so that's really neat that you're speaking to how possibly this vertical news and TikTok is allowing you to reach that audience and build around that. But something that I've been trying to think about is, you're covering such a range of topics, such a wide, I think, potential audience. And how do you stay current or on top of what's new or what you might think might be interesting for your audience? How do you do that?

Enrique Anarte: I don't. I'm always running behind schedule. I think as I said before, it starts from accepting that you can't do everything and finding ways to—I think something that we have tried to do more recently is not try to cover every single breaking news story that comes out because our days are hectic and you've got things coming out from the UK and Russia and the US from five different states. And then there's something happening in Uganda again and you're like, how do I do this? I'm a one-person video team. But more like, OK, what can we do that our competitors are not doing or how can we cover it in a way that they haven't covered it? Is there a way for us to cover this in a skit? Recently with Italy taking lesbian moms to court and stripping or potentially stripping them from their birth certificates for their nonbiological mothers, how can we cover it in a way that our competitors haven't covered it? Or if we see that certain issues have already been covered a lot by big media outlets, what's the point of us covering it when we could shed light on—I don't know what's happening right now in the Baltics that no one talks about, even though the fight for LGBTQ+ rights there is very fierce. But it's a small country that no one really cares about. And this weekend, we have a video from one of the most underreported areas in the world in general, Central Asia. No one ever talks about that. And no one—on top of that, make it queer. It's just like, no one knows anything about that. But I think for us, as I said, there isn't—there is a lot of strategy to that. As in, how do you build a brand? And a lot of it is just, how do you do things differently both in terms of formats? So, I really like that we do native mobile journalism. As in, we don't just edit stock footage together and have a voice over because that's boring, and because I don't want to watch that at 8:00 PM after a long day of work coming back from the office because I'm tired. I've been working with that all day. You might have had a bad day. You might have broken up. Your friend might be annoying. And you're like, why do I have to watch this like traditional report that sounds like the BBC 20 years ago? But if they tell you the same story in a different way, you're much more likely to watch it, even if it's about a country that you've never heard about. So, I would say, to wrap it up, part of it I think is a strategy to try to cope with the things that aren't being covered both because we care about doing that, but also because other people aren't doing it. So why don't we do it? But then also, I think we just try to do things differently because that was the point—that was the reason why we all got onto TikTok. Why did everyone leave—not leave, but decided to spend less time on Instagram or left—they left Facebook altogether? Because TikTok was different. Because TikTok had a creativity and a way of people telling things that was different to the other platforms. And I do think that there are many ways of doing things on TikTok and many traditional formats work very well. But I always ask myself, that's not why I personally spend time on TikTok. So, I wonder, how much more time do we have until we saturate people with traditional news content and they decide to go somewhere else? And how do we curate and cultivate this community that knows that we are still going to be producing native journalism that is loyal to the creativity that made TikTok different to other platforms and make people—not only people passionate about how things were done on TikTok, but the kind of stories that they found there? Because I think that—I always try to tell people, for example, when they're—like, I'm old or you're like very young and you look good on camera. And I'm like, well, but the reason why people got bored of Instagram perfection filter is because TikTok was giving them the stories about fat people, and disabled people, and migrants, and women who were talking about women's issues that Instagram was, for some reason, not mentioning or not featuring. And trans people talking about what transition is like on a daily basis. And that is what made TikTok different. And I think that element of authenticity and creativity is, in my opinion, what my reference as a journalist there, no matter how serious the issue is.

Matt Jordan: Just a reminder, this is News Over Noise. I'm Matt Jordan.

Leah Dajches: And I'm Leah Dajches.

Matt Jordan: We're talking with Enrique Anarte, a Spanish multimedia journalist based in Berlin, about vertical journalism and the future of news. I think it's interesting that what you're describing is that you're learning a lot about what audiences are engaging with and what they're interested in by being on TikTok and these other vertical platforms. What do you do differently now that you didn't used to do in terms of the way that you edit things, the way that you—the shots that you choose, the places? Because I've watched a bunch of your things, and a lot of them are either you walking and talking or sitting and talking about something. What works best on that platform and how is it inflected or changed how you do reporting?

Enrique Anarte: So, I didn't know anything about this when I started. I remember perfectly my first TikTok video, and I do not want to watch it. And if someone played it, I will leave the room because it was horrible. And I thank my bosses back then for not firing me. But I think the key, I think, to TikTok is because people's attention span is so short, is to keep things coming, new things, usually. That means maybe keeping b-roll—if you're doing a very traditional video, let's say, keep it shorter. Keep it more snappy. Something that I think people got very used to with TikTok is that people have very angles—very weird angles when it comes to talking to camera. You have the phone here and then you're like—and you're like, you look horrible when you're talking like that. But it makes it more authentic. And instead of the traditional TV framing where the journalist is statically standing in front of the London Eye in a way that feels a less natural thing that no one will ever do in real life, you think, OK, how could I make it look like—in the end, it is not natural because you're talking with a phone, talking to the phone in the middle of a very busy street in London or Berlin or—I don't know, Atlanta. No normal person would do that in a way. But I think it makes it more exciting to watch, and it makes it, in a way, less forced and more authentic if you are creating this dynamic storytelling by more frequent change of b-roll, movement in your backgrounds, having angles that people don't see on TV. And then it does—it just doesn't come across as what many of them see as boring journalism that doesn't speak to them because it doesn't take them into consideration. But I think for many of them, they're like, oh, this person actually is taking me seriously because he's using the same silly angles that I used when I make my funny videos. A lot of it is, I think, having the humility not to be perfect. Not to aim at being perfect, and just try to be like any other creator on the internet, which is not easy. Because obviously, you have your own script. And sometimes, especially when you work for organizations like the Thomson Reuters Foundation with values like impartiality and freedom of bias, many of the scripts do not look and sound as natural as a person would sound in real life. But you try to make it as natural as you can with your body language, with maybe the sentence that sounds weird. But then you introduce short pun or joke or reference to what Taylor Swift did a few days ago or the new song that she released because she doesn't stop releasing songs. Yeah. I don't know if that answered your question.

Matt Jordan: Yeah. The one that I found—one format that I found when I was looking at—and I have to say, I was looking at a lot of the stuff that you reposted on Twitter from TikTok as I've been trying to stay off TikTok myself because I have enough trouble getting work done as it is. It was a dialogue format where you talk to yourself. You pose a question and you answer a question and jump back and forth where you're facing the camera in a different angle. These seem really interesting ways to get at information and to deliver information that is very different from the way that standard journalism is done.

Enrique Anarte: And I think—say.

Leah Dajches: Go ahead. You go.

Enrique Anarte: I think I just wanted to say that that is not only an—I don't know how to say, entertaining and also engaging way to consume—produce but also consume information. But also, it is very useful when you're doing the kind of journalism that we do because when you have many characters, then it's very easy to give or open the door to journalistic values like impartiality. Because you have a character that says that and the other character that says that, which is basically what real life is like. There's the Russian government. There's the opposition groups. There's the US. There's the EU. There's whoever. I think that is not only a fun way to watch things, but it's also—from a point of view of the journalistic practice itself, it is very useful to—even if it might come across as unhinged—and sometimes it is. I will not deny that. I think from the point of view of our core journalistic values, it can be very useful.

Leah Dajches: I was just going to—it's almost like an unspoken thing that I somehow mentioned Taylor Swift in every podcast episode. And so, Enrique, I was just going to say, and by mixing up the news content and throwing celebrities in, even by just mentioning her name, my brain was like, bing, bing, bing. And I was immediately like, what? I need to know—what are we talking about? And so, I think it's really interesting to think about this creativity you have with the vertical journalism and the editing that you have at your fingertips. But something that's maybe a little bit darker is that you naturally are covering stories that could potentially receive backlash. And so, I'm wondering, because you're on social media and you're hitting your audience through segmentation on social media, is that—does that in any way reduce backlash or trolls or haters? Or if it doesn't, how do you handle that?

Enrique Anarte: Well, that's a big question. The online abuse that journalists and interviewees receive in these kind of formats where we are much more exposed both because our faces are there, and very often because a way to tell stories can be through a specific experience. So, for example, something—when I try to teach people how to be a little bit more creative, I'm like, OK, so I'm doing something about how the German Catholic Church is including LGBTQ+ people. And then the first opening line is how I was shocked when I moved to Germany that some churches had rainbow flags, which as a Spanish person I was like, what? But the video doesn't include my opinion, but that first line is probably a universal experience for someone that doesn't know LGBTQ inclusive Catholic or religious communities. But that also makes you, I think, much more vulnerable to abuse because you're put in a part of yourself there. I will say, though, that as a white man, my experience is very different to that of women and people of color. We know that women are the group that receive the biggest amount of abuse. And after that, it's people of color, trans people and certain communities such as disabled people, migrants. So, I think I myself, at least as a man, I'm relatively safe from a lot of it, even though I do get a lot of personal abuse for being an Openly gay man. But I think that it's a question that newsrooms—not me, newsrooms will have to answer in the long term, if they will take seriously the production of native vertical video formats and putting their journalists out there. And it's a question of how much support they will get. Because platforms have clearly refused to assume the responsibility that they have in moderating this content, and that's not exclusive to TikTok. It affects TikTok, but it's not exclusive to TikTok. So, if platforms refuse to protect journalists and interviewees, then if newsrooms are going to be the ones doing the content, then they will have to be the ones, in my opinion, protecting the journalists. And that's something that, I think—so first of all, we need to discuss about what newsrooms are going to do because they're clearly not doing enough, most of them. And then we need to talk about how we as individuals can protect ourselves. And there are small tips, obviously, that come from assuming that you can't do everything. But how do you protect yourself more than you were before? Don't look at the comments, never, for God's sake, because they're the worst part of humanity. But there are also—on TikTok, there are filters for certain words, which we know most people get around, but it saves you from a small amount of hate. On Instagram, there's a feature that allows only—that basically makes it not possible for people that don't follow you to comment on the video. That doesn't protect you from totally from abuse, but we know most trolls are not going to follow you. And it's an extra effort most people are not going to take. We could go on with a series of small tips that I think can protect us better, but I think the key issue is not how we protect ourselves at a small scale, but how will newsrooms protect their journalists that they're putting out there? Not only because humans and people deserve protection from online abuse, but because these people are your biggest asset as a media company, at least when it comes to your social reach. Without them, you will just have to get someone else who will also get abused. So, it's just a matter of, how do you protect them so that they can keep being great journalists and do not deal with mental health issues that arise from the horrible abuse that people in general receive on social media.

Matt Jordan: So, one thing that I also wanted to ask you about is we've worked with the Poynter Institute as part of our initiative, and we found out about you from them actually because we—and about your work MediaWise. So, you know obviously, you found vertical journalism and vertical storytelling to be a powerful teaching tool. So, what kind of things have you been doing as an ambassador with MediaWise and what types of teaching have you done there?

Enrique Anarte: Yeah. They're great. I love them. They do a great work, and I loved—I have loved working with them this year because they really like their approach to disinformation, but mostly to media literacy, which I very much agree with when it comes to the I to the we as journalists have to take when providing information online. One of the videos that we did and the one that was most fun but also the one I'm most proud of was the video where my colleague, Laura Duclos from MediaWise, played a character of a media literacy hotline, and I played the character of someone that had found a very tricky and not totally clear headline on trans athletes in sports. And so, we went through the whole process in the script and in the video of how someone, not a journalist, but how someone can by themselves fact check and verify information and just find more accurate information online. And that was a lot of fun to make because I really like how they work, but it's also, I think, just very useful. Because if you just tell people this is how things are, the day they stop trusting you, then they're going to be like, oh, says who? But if you actually tell people how to learn by themselves and how to empower themselves, you're not just empowering them or helping them empower themselves. You're also creating a trust that is long lasting within them, I think, because they're going to remind you as a person who did not just tell them what was true, but who reaffirmed them in their belief that they have enough skills and instruments in their lives to educate themselves instead of having an attitude of, which I'm not a big fan of, yeah, here's the truth, and what I say is the only truth very often, and the rest is misinformation. So yeah, I think that was the coolest part of my work with MediaWise this year. And hopefully, we will see them do much more work, and us as well, in that direction. I mean, the video did very well, and I think it's a proof of how we as journalists have to be—maybe just take one step back and be like, OK, how can we present information in a way that it does not only reach people, but is actually useful for them?

Leah Dajches: Real quickly, maybe the last question here. Something we focus on the podcast is really tips and advice. And so, we talked a little bit about that in the previous question with thinking about news literacy and giving people a sense of empowerment and agency. You have the skills; you can do this. But I'm also wondering, do you have any advice for young LGBTQ+ listeners who want to become more involved in the news making process?

Enrique Anarte: Oh, that's a lot of responsibility. I don't know. I think I would say—and what I say in general to everyone, is to not be scared to try out ways of creating content or journalism or things some people will not call us, will not call journalism online, either through videos or through other formats, either podcasts or Instagram posts with written texts on social mostly because that's what I work in, so I'll just talk about it, and experiments. Because I wasn't convinced when I started doing this. I just wanted to try out something different as I was a bit tired of my job as a tech reporter, things weren't going great. And I was offered a job making TikToks, and my mom was like, wow. And I was also like, well, I'm not sure, but I'll do it. And it turned out great. So, I think my advice would be to not be scared to try things. To experiment with things and with journalism on LGBTQ+ issues, but also on other issues. When it comes to LGBTQ+ issues right now, I think there's just like too much misinformation out there. So, any work on any kind of format that tries to counter this information—and I'm a big fan of impartiality in this sense because we already have—you have already convinced the people that agree with you. Those are not the ones that you need to convince. If you want to advocate for the rights of that community, you need to convince the ones that have not been convinced yet. And you're not going to convince them by telling them that they're wrong. You're going to convince them by fact checking information with empathy, help them verify misleading claims. So, any kind of work in that direction of media literacy and fight against misinformation in any format, even if it sounds unhinged and crazy, try it out. Because that's how I think most people my—not only my age, but most of my generation of TikTok journalists, now vertical video journalists, learned to do this. We didn't have a course. We didn't go to university and learn this. There was a pandemic, and we were at home and we were like, how do we do journalism here? And we tried things out, made many mistakes. Our videos flopped many times. And in the end, we found a way around it. And there is no secret to it. There's just effort and time and the humility to understand how audiences work.

Matt Jordan: Well, Enrique, thank you so much for talking with us today and sharing some of your insights into this interesting new world of journalism on these platforms.

Enrique Anarte: Thank you so much for having me.

Matt Jordan: That was a fascinating conversation for an old person like me to learn so much about this new way of telling stories and connecting with audiences. Leah, what are some of your takeaways?

Leah Dajches: Yeah. We just covered a lot of ground with Enrique. And a lot of things are standing out to me. Really thinking about the need for media and news literacy skills to combat against misinformation and disinformation around certain communities like the LGBTQ+, and also thinking about vertical journalism and making journalism accessible on social media through elements of transparency, context, authenticity, and really just not being afraid to give an unhinged dialogue or video a shot and see if it lands with your audience, see if it will if it will go viral. What about you, Matt?

Matt Jordan: It was interesting hearing him talk. And he touched on many of the things that we've been interested in during the course of the podcast, which are the impartiality, the need to connect with audiences. All of the things that we would think of as being traditional journalistic integrity or good storytelling, but just trying different ways to do it. And the thing that str uck me is that in connecting with audiences, having things not be perfect seems like the way to get across, which sounds like what Annie Wu was talking to us about last year. But this kind of—that something that people are attracted to when they're getting information and news is it coming from people who don't look too [? slick. ?]

Leah Dajches: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Enrique Anarte, a Spanish multimedia journalist based in Berlin. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Leah Dajches.

Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.

Leah Dajches: Until next time, stay well and well-informed.

Matt Jordan: News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and PSU. This program has been funded by the office of the executive vice president and provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News literacy initiative.

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