Reaching young audiences

This study explores two public service media's TikTok profiles and video content directed at younger audiences - BBC's Newsround and DW's Stories. The contemporary media landscape has undergone numerous transitions and industrial disruptions brought by digitalization. The emergence of social media was no different, with platforms captivating audiences, which in turn have grown distant from legacy media. Facing the growing challenge of capturing and maintaining young audiences, public service media adopt various innovative practices to reinforce their legitimacy and functionality in a fragmented, digital-first environment, expanding their relevance through content distribution on third-party platforms. As external information conduits, platforms have been prioritized by young audiences, with TikTok becoming one of the most popular apps in recent times. Thus, this study explores how two European media organizations - DW and BBC balance between providing quality, informational content and adhering to TikTok logic, utilized for creative and algorithmic enhancement. Adopting a qualitative comparative research approach, this study relies on content analysis and critical discourse analysis, respectively, applied to BBC and DW's TikToks and interpreting their public mission rhetorics. The findings from short-form video analysis revealed that DW Stories heavily prioritizes hard news reporting, providing extensive storytelling that is dominantly enhanced through various entertainment strategies. Moreover, DW's content is underscored by increased TikTok adoption, utilizing both creative and technological affordances to shape the organization's final product. Comparably, BBC Newsround prioritized soft news coverage, still sticking to extensive information provision. Differently from DW, when reporting on hard news, BBC avoided employing entertainment strategies as opposed to its soft news reports. Contrastingly to DW, Newsround represented limited platform logic, employing only a few content strategies. Collectively, the two organizations situated impartiality at the basis of their public mission, with the BBC foregrounding its legacy expertise and competitive advantage in the media landscape to legitimize its function. Diversely, DW's unbiased reporting goal is discursively framed through cooperation, justifying its digital practices as a result of audience demands. BBC's acknowledgement of the growth and relevance of social media platforms for digital news reporting was complemented by repeated discursive resistance to platform dominance, revealing the confounding implications from the advent of digitalization and subsequent rise of technological platforms in the media market.