By skyforbes 
Written by Louise Tavera
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As traditional media struggles to reach younger audiences, Süddeutsche Zeitung took a leap onto TikTok at the start of 2025. Leonie Sanke, a journalist on the newspaper’s social media team, sees the shift as essential. But adapting serious journalism to a platform shaped by trends and algorithms raises big questions — especially about how to stay relevant without compromising credibility.
To begin with, what made you pursue journalism?
I began studying media and communication in Germany. At first I was more interested in film, and not really the journalistic aspect. Then I did my first internship in a local journalism newsroom, and I had a lot of practical journalism studies in Uni. Afterwards, I applied to the Deutschen Journalistenschule in Munich, where I did my training.
I started partly as a freelance TV journalist, and I wrote pieces for these political magazines, some broadcasting services… I had my first job at the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It was an online magazine aimed at reaching younger audiences. This is where young journalists often start as a first job.
After three years I got into the video team of Süddeutsche Zeitung. When I started there, we still produced longer explanatory videos that were 3 or 4 minutes long, in an horizontal format for the website. We also had Youtube, but there was not really a focus nor an effort made to grow an audience there.
We then transitioned to social media, most specifically Instagram. We created our account two or three years ago, with a focus completely on social media video.. We didn’t have our TikTok account yet, we started with instagram, facebook, linkedin… Then, this January of 2024, we started our TikTok account. We now produce essentially for TikTok, and we try to find stories that match the platform on which we tell them.
What kind of audience are you reaching on TikTok?
On Tiktok, we can’t really tell. Before we posted any video we already had at least 400 followers. It’s not that many, but still, those were people who knew our newspaper, and saw we had an account. Apart from that, we can’t be sure if it’s the same audience. What we know is that our audience on TIkTok is way younger than instagram. On instagram they are more like 35 and up, and on TikTok, 20 to 30 years old.
That’s the target we had in mind, it’s not our aim to reach really young people, not teenagers for example, but we are trying to reach people who are already studying, who have their first jobs, or their training… We also wanted to reach a more female audience, because there is a big audience there. We are better at creating a male audience in general, though on Instagram it’s mostly even.
What kind of stories do you tell on TikTok?
We do mostly news explainers. We look at what the big topics are, what has been discussed a lot lately, and topics you might have a little knowledge about, but not necessarily the whole picture. For example, with Trump’s plan for peace between Ukraine and Russia, we diccued what’s already in place, and why his plan wouldn’t work. We also discuss political issues, such as German politics, US politics… Actually, lately we hadn’t decided to produce that much on those topics, but they are just too important at the moment. That’s why we have so much on US politics, or Gaza, Turkey…
We have a lot of correspondents in those countries, and we try to do our videos with them.They describe their reporting on the ground, and we try to make them tell us their stories from where they are.
Sometimes we also make news TikTok without hosts, neither myself nor the other journalists. We have footage that we get from Reuters and other sources, when we want to do quick news videos.
How is your TikTok strategy performing so far?
Some videos are rather successful, and we have others that perform very badly. We don’t reach the same amount of people as other news outlets, but they started earlier than us. Right now we are building our audience. We are still struggling to have only successful videos. It’s hard sometimes to know why something doesn’t really work, why the algorithm doesn’t like it… We are stil figuring it out, but we are happy with our reach so far.
Is TikTok helping build trust with younger viewers?
Mostly, our main motivation was to be where our future subscribers are. By now our subscribers are mostly older than 30 years old, so that’s why we have this need to reach a younger audience that will want to pay for us at least in a few years. It’s a way for us to show who we are, what kind of stories we do. For us it’s important to be where our future subscribers are, and convince them we do a good job telling stories that matter.
What kind of feedback do you get from viewers?
It differs a lot. Some videos don’t get comments at all, and others are discussed a lot, not always in a constructive way… Often when we work on Russia we get a lot of comments that are not that useful. Still, oftentimes we have a lot of useful and constructive feedback on the topics we are covering, which varies widely from video and video.
We try to bring the topics that we see on social media that are discussed there a lot, the ones going viral… Obviously it still has to be interesting for the people on other social platforms. We try to bring those topics to our newsroom, saying, “oh, this is what young people are interested in”. We would also like to work more closely with the politics department.
The feedback we receive is usually about the topics we’re covering, not detailed suggestions like “you should focus on this or improve that..” but to be fair, we haven’t really asked actively for this input. We have done user research and interviews beforehand, in order to know the audience we are targeting, and what they are expecting from us.
Do you think this switch to social media platforms can be the future of journalism?
Yes. It’s a good opportunity for us to be transparent, by saying who is covering these stories, how we work… We try to make our work more personal, in a way. It’s an opportunity for us. It teaches us how to tell stories in a way that is really engaging, and really on point. We also try to focus on videos that can also be consumed day to day, to reach more people. Actually, it’s not just important for our social video creation; but also it helps the way we tell our stories in general. We are learning a lot thanks to posting on social media.
Do you have to sacrifice some stories in order to play the algorithm’s game?
I wouldn’t say so. It’s not like we are doing topics that are too complicated, and that people not interested in. We do not only choose the topics which are discussed right now. If we could, we would work more on Gaza, or climate related topics. We have not had enough time in the past month. It is not something that is promising a lot of reach. We have to cover it anyway, of course. It is a challenge, for us, to find a way for those topics to be heard. Even if they are not as popular, they can still be successful –and useful– on social media.
Do you think there is a risk of journalists beginning to act like celebrities? Is it something you are worried about?
You can see this trend of acting more celebrity-like in news influenceurs, but I wouldn’t consider ourselves as news influenceurs. We are still showing that we are working in a journalistic way. We do not have our own agenda, we are covering topics as objectively as possible, we have sources and everything… Our videos are a journalistic product still.
In the meantime we also know that if someone sees a video I hosted, they might think I’m the person who did the research, etc. This is something we try to keep in mind, but people are not necessarily aware that there is a whole team behind one video. Often, we tell stories in videos that others have written. Still, I wouldn’t say the audience sees us as celebrities.
How do you research and understand your TikTok audience?
We have done this user research before even going on TIkTok, in order to get feedback from people on these videos. What is really striking is that things they expected from us are not necessarily things that are successful. For example, we opted for a more professional style — with a studio setting, high-quality camera, and no selfie-style videos… Because people asked for that. And now, a part of our audience are saying that we are not looking like TikTok.
The feedback is rather mixed. At the beginning, we used to hear that we should look more like a professional media organization. Now, younger people are saying we look too old and professional. Still, we want them to know we are a credible source, and not some news influenceurs with their own agenda.
It’s really hard to find the right balance; I fear we will never be able to.