Infotainment on Social Media: How News Companies Combine Information and Entertainment in News Stories on Instagram and TikTok

Abstract

News companies increasingly produce genuine content for social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Unlike content posted on Facebook or X, these news stories are often stand-alone news products adapted to the platforms’ logic and aesthetics. Since Instagram and TikTok are primarily known as entertainment platforms, this raises concerns about the informativeness of such news content. With this study, we therefore explore to what extent news stories on Instagram and TikTok provide relevant information about current affairs, and to what extent this information is combined with entertaining elements. To do so, we collected Instagram stories (N = 1946) and TikTok videos (N = 677) of the six largest Swiss news outlets for a full week each month during a year (February 2022 to January 2023). We compare the prevalence of hard and soft news topics, the degree of information and entertaining elements, and the co-occurrence of information and entertainment (infotainment) between tabloid and quality news outlets, as well as between the two investigated platforms.