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Abstract
This study examines using TikTok storytelling in a journalism course. The author incorporated the assignment into a multimedia course in spring 2020, requiring students to find and tell a story on deadline through the popular video-sharing application. The majority of Americans access news through social media, and news organizations regularly require applicants to be fluent in digital storytelling. Whereas existing research assesses ways of integrating Twitter, Facebook and Instagram into reporting courses, this study strives to add to that research by exploring what students learned and what other benefits and concerns they identified by integrating TikTok into journalism curricula. Overall, students reported that the experience nurtured creativity, taught them how to think and act quickly in the field, and fostered collaboration. Despite well-publicized questions about the Chinese government's influence on TikTok, few students expressed ethical concerns about journalists adding TikTok to their storytelling repertoire.
Social Media, Journalism Education, TikTok, Multimedia, Critical Thinking
Introduction
Instagram began a decade ago, Twitter soon will be 15 years old, and Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook at Harvard University almost 17 years ago, but no social media platform has gained as much influence - as swiftly - as TikTok, a social media application for making and sharing short videos. TikTok spawned 19-year-old Lil Nas X's song "Old Town Road" to become Billboards longest-running No. 1 hit (Frank, 2019) and enticed The Washington Post to begin posting humorous skits set in the newsroom (Nover, 2019). A headline from the New York Times epitomizes the social media application's influence: "How TikTok is Rewriting the World" (Herrman, 2019).
The social media app ranked as one of the most downloaded apps of the 2010s - outranking YouTube and Twitter - despite launching near the decade's end (A Look Back at the Top Apps and Games of the Decade, 2019). It also generated the most downloads for any app ever in a single quarter (Chapple, 2020). Introduced in 2016, TikTok attracted users and attention by making it easy for users to record themselves lip-synching popular songs (Asarch, 2018). Although Facebook still reigns with 255 million monthly active users in the United States and Canada (Sonnemaker, 2020), TikTok's meteoric rise shows no signs of slowing, with the app engaging more than 100 million Americans as...