About the Guest:
EnriqueAnarteis a Berlin-based reporter and International Relations graduate with a passion for producing high-quality, audience-focused journalism that can build bridges and shed light on underreported topics. Currently, he leads the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s first-ever TikTok team - for Openly, its LGBTQ+ news brand - and is a regular writer for TRF covering queer stories across Europe, with a focus on the human impact of politics and policy. He previously reported for DW, NBC News,Reutersand EFE, among others. Recent, Enrique joined the Poynter Institute’sMediaWiseambassador program with a focus on countering mis/disinformation targeting LGBTQ+ people.
Episode Transcript:
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.
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: 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 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 we unpacked 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 I’m wondering 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. So that's a challenge. 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, I think all these different features, either text on camera, the description—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.
Leah Dajches: Is this starting to dabble in the idea of vertical journalism or is this something completely different? 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.
Matt Jordan: 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. 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 but more like 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. So, yeah, I don't know if I answered your question. I think that go very long.
Matt Jordan:I think 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 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 at 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. 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? 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.
Leah Dajches: If you’re just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I'm Leah Dajches.
Matt Joran: And I'm Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: We're talking with Enrique Anarte, a Spanish multimedia journalist based in Berlin, about vertical journalism and the future of news. 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, 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. 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.
Matt Jordan: 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.
Leah Dajches: 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: 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 struck 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.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. 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.
