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When Refresher, a Hungarian lifestyle magazine, joined ENTR, a pan-European project to produce short-form video journalism for a Gen Z audience, the staff faced a question many journalists ask themselves when they go on social media: How do we not make it cringe? Léna Pálfy and Júlia Gróf, the co–editorial leads for ENTR at Refresher, started with the basics: “The first few seconds are crucial,” Gróf, who is twenty-six, said. “So is the time of posting. But it’s mostly about the person on-screen: you must look and sound like you’re one of the audience, and you need to show genuine interest in what you’re talking about.”
Getting that right wasn’t easy at first. “We started experimenting,” Gróf recalled. “We tried super-hectic Gen Alpha stuff, where our presenter kept moving around, chewing gum, making faces, shifting the camera, adding effects, whatnot. The comments showed that it was ‘unwatchable.’ It even made Gen Z people feel old. Then we did some boring studio stuff, and that wasn’t enough. We found the sweet spot using a fixed camera and a casual background, and let our presenter have fun with it.” She added, “For most people on our team, it’s their first job. We didn’t even study anything related to journalism. We’re exactly like the people who watch our videos from their couch.”
It’s been a year since Refresher joined ENTR, an initiative that began during the pandemic when the European Commission put out a call for proposals to “enrich pan-European debate among young Europeans”—in other words, to find ways for journalism to reach young people. Coordinated by Deutsche Welle, the German public broadcaster, ENTR now involves media outlets in nine languages across eight EU member states. The coverage is supposed to be about current affairs—politics, climate change, education, social justice. “But we don’t explain the institutions,” Lukas Hansen, the editorial lead of ENTR for DW and the coordinator of the international collaboration, told me. “We rarely cover what is being discussed in the European Parliament. We focus on issues that young people can relate to across Europe.” So far this year, on average, ENTR’s videos and articles have reached eleven million people per month.
Now Samu Seres, Refresher’s presenter, is one of the most recognizable faces on Hungarian social media. He is twenty-five, with a buzz cut that he usually covers with a beret or baseball cap; he wears a pair of rings in his ears and on his fingers, graphic tees, and sweatpants. He sets up his camera in his living room. “Nowadays, Russia flies drones into European airspace for banter,” he told followers, by way of explaining the EU’s plans for establishing a drone wall on its eastern border, while shadowboxing with the camera. “Brad Pitt and George Clooney couldn’t have pulled off a better heist,” he said of the Louvre robbery; then he put on a balaclava and pretended to dance around laser beams.
Seres started producing TikTok news explainers as a college student for fun in 2020. “I initially found his videos unwatchable—his intonation and his gestures were awkward and annoying,” Pálfy told me. Seres, like anyone, had to tinker with the formula. By the time he joined Refresher, last year, he had tens of thousands of followers. He’s since broadened his fan base as part of the ENTR program. “They make it cool by not forcing it to be cool,” Nóra Salga, a twenty-six-year-old hotel manager who watches the videos, said. Zsófia Zsadányi, a twenty-seven-year-old manager at a multinational company, agreed: “They found the fine line between trashiness and seriousness.”
Seres told me that he follows a “ten-step process” in his posts. “I lose fifty percent of the audience in the first second, so I have that long to drop a keyword that hooks people. It’s borderline clickbait.” After that: “You have two sentences to keep them engaged.” He also makes use of props. “And the video should go full circle and answer the initial question, or reiterate the thesis sentence from the beginning.”
When I asked him how he avoids the cringe trap, he replied: “The press never seemed to understand TikTok’s entry requirements. I always smile when I get asked how to talk to young people. Older generations think it’s a homogeneous group and you need to use a certain vernacular or refer to certain TV shows that are trending to get to them. No. All you’ve got to be is honest, grab their attention, and treat them like adults.” Crucially, Seres does not refer to himself as a journalist. “It would be rude towards journalists, towards journalistic ethics and standards,” he said. “I look at myself as a content creator; it’s a completely different skill set, and it allows me to be quicker than legacy media.”
Part of the trick for ENTR has been reverse engineering the standard journalistic pivot to social media. “Our content needs to fit to the platform first,” Hansen told me. ENTR primarily runs on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, but the next phase of the project, which began this October, focuses on TikTok. “I’ve had colleagues who came to me questioning: ‘Hey, why are we on TikTok? It’s an evil Chinese platform. We should not be doing it. It’s only cat content. Young people are stupid,’” Hansen said. “I get really mad when I hear these things. We are talking about the most educated generation that has ever existed. They are interested in politics to various extents and are able to consume a lot of content. Sure, we can keep writing twenty-thousand-letter online articles that are well-researched, but are they going to read it?”
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