By skyforbes 
TikTok breaks traditional interviews – turning them into fast, playful clips, where there is no essence that is lost in brainrot.
The contrast is brutal. Fresh examples from the video show how media women or journalists turn into “influencers,” asking questions for likes rather than meaning. Influence has killed journalism, and studios have realised that one viral brainrot clip on TikTok is now more valuable than ten thoughtful articles by trained journalists. The aftermath is pure chaos.
It wasn’t always chaos. In the 1980s, George Clooney interviews had both thoughtful questions and good humor. Diane Sawyer could hold a pause that allowed a person’s truth to be told. Interviews used to be vehicles for insight, not for re-repackaging or slicing into snippets that fit a TikTok trend.
Why it matters:
• Audience behavior has changed: short videos allow for instantaneous comment, but not nuanced answers.
• Journalists have no choice but to adapt – even The Washington Post has used TikTok as the pre-eminent platform to reach their audience.
• Journalistic presentation is shifting: humor or play in short videos has more of an audience draw – and short-form journalism content is inclining steeply while depth declines.
Experts agree. Analysis from the International Center for Journalists shows that reporters now rely on the “hook + casual pitch” formula, shooting in a style that feels like chatting with friends. It boosts engagement but blurs the line between information and entertainment. Once the audience sees journalism as just another meme stream, trust collapses.
Gen Z and the Interview Problem
For Gen Z, interviews aren’t background noise – they are part of the shared online language. Those interviews aren’t consumed in the way that our parents used to: watching a full thirty-minute sit-down. Rather, they meet these interviews for their feeds, already sliced into small pieces and remixed, sometimes with captions. So an A-lister could be trending not for a new film or album but for a single phrase plucked out of thin air, slipped into a reaction meme.
TikTok makes that micro-moment the entire story. All the nuance goes out the window; setting the scene becomes irrelevant. What really counts is whether the clip can be stitched with another video or duetted, or just made into an inside joke. In that process, the original meaning behind the conversation is either completely lost or replaced with some spin that the internet finds hilarious or most shareable.
It isn’t that Gen Z can’t handle depth. We can, and we want to. The problem, though, is that the platforms we’re on make speed and instant gratification more attractive than being patient. We scroll until something makes us stop and either laugh or gasp, but if it takes more than 10 seconds, the next video is already selected. For journalism, that’s quite a dangerous economy.
When we only see the punchline, we forget to ask about the setup. We lose the thread of the bigger conversation – the kind of context that makes a story real, not just viral. It’s like reading one highlighted sentence from a novel and assuming you know the plot.
As Gen Z grows into the next generation of journalists, producers, and storytellers, we’ll have to decide: are we willing to fight for the longer, messier truth? Or will we keep making the kind of journalism that survives only in 15-second loops? Because if interviews are going to survive, they’ll need more than good lighting and a viral soundbite – they’ll need audiences ready to listen.
TikTok has turned news into punchlines. Humor drives clicks, virality drives newsroom priorities, and depth becomes optional. For someone like me, planning a career in media, this isn’t just an abstract observation – it’s a glimpse into the field I’m stepping into. I want to tell stories that matter, but the platforms I’ll have to use may demand that I make them snackable.
This is not the end of interviews. It’s an evolution. But if we let the algorithm dictate the shape of our conversations, we’ll lose the art of listening – and the journalism left behind will be a shadow of what it was meant to be. Interviews should still be places where meaning survives the edit, not where it dies for a punchline.