The rise of the TikTok news anchor

“BREAKING NEWS: it looks like there is some weird stuff going on in America.” Welcome to the news on TikTok. Before we dwell on how and when it is appropriate to start a sentence with “breaking news”, let’s cross now to our correspondent, who is a cartoon fish, with a story about a “Potential Diabetes Cure!” (3.4m views). Next, “News Daddy” (a boy called Dylan) will read out details of a hotel explosion in Texas to some of his 10.3m followers, thankfully from the safety of his home studio in Britain; “Nah 2024 needs to chill…i need some sleep,” the description reads. In our final segment, a college student is primed to run through the pages of the (the Iowa caucus is “just tea, it’s gossip”).Each of these videos comes from a cohort of amateur anchors who take the business of delivering the news extremely seriously. They are the presenters, researchers and producers rolled into one. Their uploads on everything from product recalls to the war in Gaza caricature traditional news reports, aggregate them—and compete with them. News Daddy’s follower count exceeds that of the flagship TikTok accounts of the , the and the combined. The handful of influencers your correspondent (who is not a cartoon fish) met have over half a billion likes on all of their videos between them.