What Roles Can Journalists (Still) Play for the Self-Curating News User? Exploring How Young Adults Tailor Their Social Media News Feeds

As young adults increasingly turn to social media for news, they rely on an eclectic mix of journalistic and non-journalistic sources to shape their daily news intake. To navigate this complexity, social media news users develop personal curation practices such as (un)liking or (un)following content to construct their personal news feeds. The study examines how these practices inform the roles that news users attribute to journalists. Using a novel mixed-methods approach that integrates visualized Instagram and TikTok data donations (DDPs) as elicitation tools within interviews ( n = 21), we capture how and why social media users manage their exposure to news. The findings identify four key drivers underlying these personal news curation practices: the pursuit of positivity, opinion affirmation, clarity, and diversity. Within this context, journalists are positioned as both diversifiers of content and benchmarks for clarity.