The awkward rise of Instagram as a news site

On a recent Wednesday in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood, Mosheh Oinounou, a former producer for CBS, Bloomberg News and Fox News, swiped through Instagram. He had started his morning reading the major newspapers and more than a dozen newsletters. He then spent much of the day converting many of the articles into posts on his Instagram account Mo News.

A Wall Street Journal story about aging Americans was relayed via a photo of a cake with the caption: “Record number of Americans turning 65 this year: rich, active and single.” At times, Mr. Oinounou, an affable 41-year-old, has also appeared on camera with the co-host of his daily news podcast to explain the importance of the Republican presidential candidates and why President Biden was a write-in. candidate in New Hampshire.

The content has earned Mo News 436,000 Instagram followers, turning what had been a pandemic side project into a venture with three full-time employees and a bigger spotlight. In December, the State Department offered Mo News an interview with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Mr Oinounou said the agency told him: “We understand how people get their news.”

“People are very critical and cynical about the information they get through traditional channels,” Mr. Oinounou said in an interview. “It resonates with the way this man shares the news on Instagram.”

Mr. Oinounou is part of a group of personalities who have discovered how to package information and post it on Instagram, making the social platform increasingly a force in the news. Following the way older generations used Facebook, many millennials and Gen to disappear.

Traditional news organizations, including The New York Times, have large Instagram feeds where they share reporting, but these news accounts have a different appeal and have become more visible in recent years.

They curate content like old-fashioned blogs and talk to the camera like TikTok and YouTube influencers. They take headlines from many major media outlets and add their own analysis. They talk to followers in comments and through direct messages, using the feedback and questions to shape additional messages. Many promise to be impartial.

“For a lot of people, they have the chefs they trust, the doctors they trust and then there's another category of news and information they trust,” said Jessica Yellin, former chief White House correspondent for CNN. Ms. Yellin, who has more than 650,000 followers her news Instagram account and a media brand called News Not Noise calls itself an “info-encer.”

All this makes Instagram, owned by Meta, an increasingly important news channel in this year's US presidential elections. Last year, 16 percent of American adults regularly exercised got news on Instagramfaster than TikTok, X and Reddit, and higher than 8 percent according to Pew Research in 2018. More than half of that group were women.

News influencers have become popular on Instagram, even as the platform has tried to de-emphasize political content. Instagram and its sister platform Facebook have been plagued by accusations of spreading misinformation and fueling political debates. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, is averse to the app collaborating with or promoting news accounts.

This month, Mr Mosseri said Instagram would not recommend “political content” in various parts of the app unless users have signed in to see it. The platform said the political content included posts “potentially related to issues such as laws, elections or social topics.”

In the week following Mr. Mosseri's announcement, news accounts experienced declines in shares, comments, likes, reach and video views, according to an analysis by social media management company Dash Hudson. The share of posts from 70 major news accounts on Instagram, including The Times and NPR, fell an average of 26 percent week over week, the company found.

In protest, Ms. Yellin made a video denouncing the changes on Instagram, writing in her newsletter that the moves would “inevitably impact how well informed the electorate is, and could have far-reaching consequences for the future of the media and even democracy.”

An Instagram spokeswoman declined to comment on Mr. Mosseri's statements. Mr Mosseri has previously praised some news influencers for their work. He follows a paid subscriber account of Mo News on Instagram.

Other prominent news influencers on Instagram include Sharon McMahon, 46, a former high school teacher in Duluth, Minnesota, who has attracted more than a million followers by explaining the basics of government. There are more overtly political influencers, such as Emily Amick, 39, a lawyer with more than 134,000 followers. Other news accounts include Roca newsfounded by twenty-somethings who see Instagram as an important way to reach peers who feel alienated by traditional news media.

Ms. McMahon said she was inspired to start her Instagram news account after seeing misinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election. She recently posted graphs on her Instagram account about encounters with migrants at the U.S. southern border, from Customs and Border Protection, which garnered more than 30,000 likes, as well as an interview with Rep. Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat who is a long-term challenger. to President Biden.

“I don't really consider myself a journalist, but more of a teacher,” Ms. McMahon said. “I explain what's happening instead of getting a scoop, digging up the story and creating sources.”

Instagram is a starting point for expanding into newsletters and podcasts, where the accounts can monetize through ads or subscriptions. Many news influencers also accept paid sponsorship deals that they include in Instagram posts. Ms. McMahon runs a private book club for subscribers — which has a waiting list — and offers paid video workshops to learn more about government and current political issues.

Ms. Yellin, the former CNN correspondent, began posting news on Instagram in 2018 around the time of the Supreme Court hearings for Brett M. Kavanaugh. She showed people what happened during the hearings and posted explainers during the Trump administration, such as defining terms like sanctions for her followers.

Ms. Yellin's rise was aided by celebrity fans such as Jessica Seinfeld and Amy Schumer. Ms. Seinfeld, who has about 600,000 Instagram followers, came across Ms. Yellin's news account and urged people to follow it.

“My idea was that we can engage news avoiders, and also people who partially pay attention to the news but are freaked out by it,” said Ms. Yellin, who has five full- and part-time employees.

Her ethos for delivering news on Instagram is summed up by her tagline: “We give you information, not a panic attack.”

When the White House hosted an opening party for Internet influencers last year, Mr. Oinounou, Ms. Yellin and Ms. Amick were invited. Christian Tom, director of the White House Digital Strategy Office, who helped come up with the idea for the party, said the administration regularly worked with Instagram news accounts.

“There are so many accounts that share news and information and have an audience of millions of people who may not hear from the White House or may not follow the White House at all,” he said.

Mr. Tom pointed to Instagram-first news brands like @Impact and @Betches_News, meme and entertainment accounts like @Pubity, and progressive media publications like MeidasTouch and A More Perfect Union.

“Each generation makes these tools and uses them in their own way,” he said.

Even with Instagram's changes to news content, users will continue to see news from the accounts they already follow and through their friends' Stories.

“Everyone has become a kind of broadcaster or a source of information for friends and family,” Mr. Oinounou said.

Ms. Amick said she had seen her peers turn to Instagram for news because “social media apps have become stratified by generation.” She considers herself a kind of “general opinion editor,” rather than a news source like Mo News or Ms. Yellin, and sees Instagram as a place to mobilize millennial women around issues like reproductive rights.

“My friends who are millennial moms are busy: They have jobs, they have kids, they have to put food on the table,” she said. “They don't have a lot of extra time to consume news, and they were already on Instagram. So this is the way for them to consume news through a modality they already use.”