Instagram becomes a news platform with ‘infoencers’ – 02/26/2024 – Market

On a recent Wednesday in New York, Mosheh Oinounou, a former producer for CBS, Bloomberg News and Fox News, scrolled through his Instagram feed. He had started his morning by reading major newspapers and various newsletters. He then spent most of the day turning many of these articles into posts on his social media profile, under the name Mo News.

A Wall Street Journal story about the aging of Americans was shared via an image of a cake declaring that the “number of Americans who will turn 65 breaks record in 2024.”

Oinounou, 41, also sometimes appears on video with the co-host of her daily news podcast to show how Republican presidential candidates are doing in the polls and explain why President Joe Biden is not on the New Hampshire ballot.

The content earned Mo News 436,000 followers on Instagram, transforming what had been a side project during the pandemic into a more prominent company with three full-time employees.

In December, the State Department offered Mo News an interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The ministry told Oinounou that it understands how people are consuming news these days.

“People are very critical and cynical about the information they are receiving from traditional sources,” Oinounou said in an interview. “It’s gotten to the point where some random guy on Instagram is producing the news.”

Oinounou is part of a group of personalities who discovered how to package information and deliver it through Instagram, transforming the social network increasingly into a news platform.

Many millennials and Gen Xers feel more comfortable reading news on Instagram and sharing posts and videos with friends on Stories, which disappear after 24 hours.

Traditional news companies like The New York Times have large Instagram feeds where they share stories, but news profiles like Mo News have a different appeal and have become more visible in recent years.

They curate content like early internet blogs and talk to the camera like TikTok and YouTube influencers. They take headlines from several major outlets and add their own analysis. They chat with followers in the comments and exchange messages, using feedback and questions to craft new posts. Many say they are non-partisan.

“A lot of people have the chefs they trust, the doctors they trust, and now there’s a category of news and information they trust,” said Jessica Yellin, a former White House correspondent for CNN.

Yellin, who has more than 650,000 followers on her Instagram news account and a brand called News Not Noise, calls herself an “infoencer”, a mix of information and influencer.

All of this makes Meta’s Instagram an increasingly important news outlet in this year’s US presidential elections. As of last year, 16% of US adults got their news on Instagram regularly, surpassing TikTok, X and Reddit. In 2018, the share was 8%, according to the Pew Research Center. More than half of this group were women.

News influencers have become popular on Instagram even after the platform tried to devalue political content. Instagram and its sister platform Facebook have been plagued by accusations of spreading misinformation and inflaming political debates.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has prevented the app from associating with or promoting news accounts.

This month, Mosseri said that Instagram would not recommend “political content” in different parts of the app unless users choose to see it. The platform said the political content included posts “potentially related to subjects such as laws, elections or social topics.”

In the week after Mosseri’s announcement, news accounts experienced a drop in shares, comments, likes, reach and views, according to an analysis from social media management company Dash Hudson.

Shares of posts from 70 major news accounts on Instagram, including the Times and NPR, fell an average of 26% for the week, according to the company.

In protest, Yellin made a video denouncing Instagram’s changes and wrote in his newsletter that the measures “will inevitably impact voters’ access to information and could have far-reaching repercussions for the future of media and even democracy.”

An Instagram spokesperson declined to comment beyond statements from Mosseri, who has already praised some news influencers for their work. He follows a paid account exclusive to Mo News subscribers on Instagram.

Other prominent news influencers on Instagram include Sharon McMahon, 46, a former high school teacher in Duluth, Minnesota, who has attracted more than 1 million followers by explaining how government works.

There are more politically explicit influencers, like Emily Amick, 39, a lawyer with more than 134,000 followers. There’s also Roca News, created by young people in their 20s who see Instagram as a way to reach peers who feel alienated by traditional media outlets.

McMahon said she was inspired to start her Instagram news account after seeing misinformation before the 2020 election.

“I don’t really see myself as a journalist, but more of a teacher,” McMahon said. “I’m explaining what’s going on instead of looking for sources, investigating and getting the scoop.”

Instagram serves as a starting point that then expands to newsletters and podcasts, where accounts can earn money through advertising or subscriptions. Many news influencers also accept deals to embed ads in social media posts.

McMahon runs a book club closed to subscribers — which has a waiting list to join — and offers paid video workshops for anyone who wants to learn more about government and current political issues.

When the White House hosted a party for influencers last year, Oinounou, Yellin and Amick were invited. Christian Tom, director of the White House’s office of digital strategy, who helped conceive the idea for the party, said the administration regularly works with Instagram news accounts.

“There are a lot of accounts that share news that have an audience of millions of people who may not be reached by the White House or who don’t follow it at all,” he said.

Even with Instagram’s changes to content reach, users will continue to see news from accounts they already follow and through their friends’ Stories.

“Everyone has kind of become a vehicle or a source of information for friends and family,” Oinounou said.