TikTokisation of the News: News Media Content Production Strategies in Portugal

The platformisation of journalism (van Dijck et al., 2018), has compelled news media to adapt to network media logic (Klinger & Svensson, 2015), affecting journalistic practices and norms (Hermida & Mellado, 2020). Several challenges emerged for media outlets, including competition for attention, news avoidance, and the dominance of social media as primary news sources (Freelon & Wells, 2020; Newman et al., 2023). Among platforms, TikTok represents an opportunity for news media to engage with new audiences, particularly those who tend to avoid traditional news sources. TikTok's algorithm assesses content virality based on factors like sound, hashtags, and content itself (Klug, 2020), prompting media outlets to develop new strategies to compete in this space (Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2022). Our study focuses on Portuguese media, which received limited attention despite TikTok's rapid adoption rate growth, rising from 13% in 2020 to 45% in 2023 (Newman et al., 2023). We analysed the last 58 TikTok posts of the most popular Portuguese media according to the Digital News report 2023 starting from 2023-09-01, identifying various elements, such as music, hashtags, featured subjects, topic, etc. (Negreira-Rey et al., 2022; Vázquez-Herrero, et al., 2022). To uncover newsroom strategies, we applied Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components to identify post clusters. These strategies have then been correlated with the number of views to determine their effectiveness in engaging audiences.