“Is This News?”: How Audiences Recognize, Expect, and Evaluate Emerging News Genres in Short-Form Video Social Media

Local broadcasters are moving into short-form video (SFV) social media spaces, like TikTok or Instagram Reels, producing content in an emerging genre. While a news genre is established for broadcast TV, the news genre is not yet established on SFV platforms and is undergoing the negotiation process between what is expected, tolerated, or skipped. In this work, we investigate what audiences recognize as news on these platforms and how algorithmically fragmented audiences negotiate these emerging genres. We then conducted in-depth interviews with typical audience members using news videos adapted to the SFV platform to learn how audiences understand what news forms are recognized and what forms news takes in this medium. We found that audiences have detailed form and function expectations of videos to match their genre expectations in line with their personalized algorithms. News was rarely recognized as a distinct genre but subsumed into the “informational” genre. To a great extent, personal taste determined the fi ttingness of the stimuli videos to audience’s expectations. These data have implications for current and future newsroom production strategies.