Explaining the news on Instagram in the Trump era
COURIER’s IG accounts are seeing record growth. Is it the result of a TikTok ban? A Trump bump? Meta policy changes? The answer is likely all of the above.
Welcome to For the Record! For the past few years, I’ve sent these updates to a small, private list of friends, supporters, and allies every Friday. Now that we’ve entered this new, wild period for American democracy and media, I thought it would be useful to open up these updates to a broader audience - hoping it inspires others to join this critical work or partner with our team. Each week, I’ll continue to use this space to highlight my team’s success stories and share my perspective on what needs to happen to build impactful civic media infrastructure at scale.
Running a fast-growing, social-first media company in 2025 means staying nimble and adapting to new industry trends as they emerge. As many of you know by now, one of the largest upheavals impacting our industry this quarter has been the uncertain future of TikTok, a platform on which we have seen tremendous growth over the past 12 months.
While we are not stepping away from TikTok and continue growing our audience share on that platform rapidly, I wanted to share how COURIER is seeing significant audience growth on other platforms, too - specifically the app’s primary rival, Instagram. According to a recent Pew survey, 1-in-5 Americans regularly get their news from Instagram, and it’s a place our team has invested heavily over the years.
In the past six weeks alone, we have added more than 187,000 new Instagram followers across our network, which is a 37% increase from where we were on January 1st. Our team believes this has been driven by three major factors: 1) TikTok’s uncertain future, 2) increased interest in the news (i.e. “a Trump Bump”), and 3) recent Meta policy changes phasing in political content to more users.
Just in the past 90 days, our national account has seen a surge in viewership on its posts, racking up more than 212 million post views and 14 million interactions since mid-November. The vast majority of those views have come since January 20th, from users seeking news and information about the new Trump administration’s actions and impacts.
The content we publish on Instagram across our network is a combination of direct-to-camera videos, interviews with elected officials and local leaders, newsy headline cards, and swipeable explainer carousels. Just as we approach all other key information distribution platforms we leverage at COURIER, our reporters have learned to adapt the best practices of well-reported, factual, and relevant local journalism to formats that audiences actually want to consume, and have made themselves the trusted creators journalists have historically been to their communities – albeit in more traditional formats – throughout history. Deploying a diverse mix of formats and collaborating with major partner accounts not only keeps our news-avoidant audiences informed and engaged on the news and information that impacts their lives and communities, but has really powered our recent growth on one of the most important platforms reaching most Americans in the U.S. today.
Our ability to reach millions of Americans with scrollable, swipeable content on Instagram is a key part of our vision to be a fully multi-platform media company. In order to be successful in this volatile era for media and technology, we can’t put all of our eggs in one basket or over-invest in one audience to the detriment of others. While IG currently makes up about 11% of COURIER’s total audience, we’re also rapidly growing our email subscriber base, experimenting with YouTube, and seeing steady growth on Facebook and TikTok too.
If you don’t already follow our national brand @couriernewsroom, you can do so here. You can also find links to each of our local websites here, where you can easily find their individual social media accounts.
If you want to learn more about our programs and platforms, feel free to reach out to me directly (tara@goodinfo.us). Thanks again for your support,
Tara
More news from the team
After a post-election break, we’ve re-launched our industry-leading digital politics newsletter, FWIW, under the authorship of Lucy Ritzmann. Every Friday, Lucy will track digital political trends and spending in our politics. Subscribe here >>
I was on Stephanie Gerber Wilson’s “Freedom over Fascism” podcast last week to discuss the information wars. You can listen to the full episode here.
What I’m reading this week
Fake, viral conspiracies on X overrun US politics (Semafor, 2/11)
“More and more news consumers distrust the “legacy” press, associate it with censorship and self-censorship. If something wild flies across their screens and newspapers aren’t running with it, that doesn’t mean it’s fake; that means the newspapers are compromised. And if the information is credibly proven to be fake, it must be a psyop or a distraction.”
How the Trumps Turned an Election Victory Into a Cash Bonanza (WSJ, 2/14)
“The pace and volume of the family’s moneymaking efforts so far are unprecedented, surpassing even the activity of Trump’s first term, which drew condemnation from ethics watchdogs and congressional Democrats.”
Fox Acquires Company Behind Conservative and True Crime Podcasts (New York Times, 2/10)
“The Fox Corporation said on Monday that it had acquired Red Seat Ventures, a growing digital media company that has become a go-to partner for old-media stars like Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan as they create their own independent online programming.”
BuzzFeed to launch new social media platform called BF Island (Axios, 2/11)
“BuzzFeed is creating its own social media platform as a joyful alternative to addictive social media feeds, CEO Jonah Peretti tells Axios. Why it matters: If the experiment works, it will put BuzzFeed "in a totally different kind of business, where it's primarily a tech company and a new kind of social media company," Peretti says.”
TikTok and CapCut shoot to the top of App Store downloads as Bytedance returns to phones (Fast Company, 2/14)
“ByteDance’s TikTok and CapCut apps are back in the Apple and Google app stores after having been absent from both for nearly a month. And in a sign of just how popular both apps are, both apps have rocketed up the App Store charts.”