Remediating Authority: How Journalists Adjust Their Sources for TikTok Audiences

Journalists are increasingly pressured to produce content for different platforms. The story that first appeared on the television broadcast now also needs to be formatted and adapted for publication on other social media platforms, a process known as remediation. Not only does the format change during the remediation process, but some of the content first aired on television is also transformed, including the sources that journalists rely on to tell their stories. This article aims to shed light on how the sources used on TV broadcasts change when that content is later posted on TikTok. Through a comparative analysis of TV items and TikTok videos from Dutch news outlets (N = 170), this study provides insights into whether and how news outlets remediate their content to align with TikTok's logic. Our results show significant differences between the use of sources in the same TV and TikTok items; when journalists present a news item on TV, it often includes more specialized and elite sources. When the same item is presented on TikTok, journalists replace some of those elite sources and rely more on people under 18 years old as a source. These results present significant professional and democratic implications.