By freelance health journalist and MJA award-winner Rosie Taylor
As a print journalist who has always hidden behind the camera, I couldn’t imagine anything less appealing than the idea of filming myself and putting it on social media.
But last year I started sharing video explainers of my reporting on both TikTok and Instagram. Why? Because I realised journalists need to take our reporting to where audiences are getting their information from. And the reality is that for many people, that is now social media.
Before this, I spent years despairing about the rise of misleading and, frankly, dangerous health misinformation swilling around social media. But my response was to bury my head in the sand and implore everyone I knew to keep reading traditional news publications instead. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.
Then, last year, I saw a post by Sophia Smith Galer – one of the first UK journalists to start reporting directly on TikTok – who said we can no longer pretend the shift to social media isn’t happening. Her argument is that if we want to keep the public informed and make people trust journalists again, we need to be providing quality reporting on social media too. We can’t just complain about misinformation, we have to counter it.
It was a lightbulb moment – I decided it was time to get my reporting out there. Since then, I’ve gained around 3,000 new followers and my posts have been viewed around 1 million times.
New audiences
While those numbers are tiny compared to influencers, it’s wonderful to see the information I’m sharing about new NHS advice, government health policy and misleading marketing is getting to new audiences. And I know that my reporting is reaching people who haven’t read it before, because so many of the comments I get are along the lines of: “OMG I didn’t know this.”
From a journalistic point of view, it’s also been a great source of stories. Building up a social media community in my health niche (women’s health and maternity), for example, has led to people trusting me with tip-offs or coming forward as case studies.
I won’t pretend it’s been an easy ride – or “journey”, as they love to say on social media. As someone who had never had a TikTok account and basically only used Instagram to share photos of sunsets with friends and family, I am absolutely not a “digital native”. As well as a lot of trial and error, I invested in a few online courses to help me get started.
To any health journalist wondering if they should get on social media, I would say: go for it. The more journalists there are out there showing the public what accurate reporting and reliable health information really looks like, the better.
Your work might reach new audiences or you may uncover new stories – and you have nothing to lose by giving it a go.
Rosie is on TikTok and Instagram as @rosietaylorjournalism