TikTok Journalism: A Methodological Approach to Content Analysis on the Short-Video Platform

Abstract

TikTok has become a fast-growing platform and the public accessing news content through it has increased dramatically. In the context of platformized and distributed journalism, TikTok has aroused great interest among researchers in journalism studies. We are addressing a short-form video and social entertainment platform, which requires a specific approach to its contents, which are multimodal and complex. In this chapter, we review previous literature and propose journalistic content analysis objectives, data collection and sampling strategies, and methods to analyse TikTok users and posts. Opportunities and challenges posed by the platform for journalism studies are also discussed.