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Two years ago, Kelsey Russell—then a twenty-two-year-old graduate student focused on education, sociology, and policy—came to a stark realization: she had no idea what was going on in the news. What she did know came to her in unfiltered torrents on social media, an experience that left her feeling emotionally off kilter, and no better able to hold a conversation about domestic politics or international affairs. This was, in some ways, surprising: Russell was a prolific content creator, as comfortable on social media as the most Gen Z of Gen Zers; she began making humorous lifestyle videos as an undergraduate in Boston, often about the experience of being Black in a notoriously white city. (Boston, Russell recently told an audience at a National Press Foundation conference, was “the antithesis of Atlanta,” where she grew up. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what I am doing with my Black self here.’”) Her audience clearly couldn’t get enough of her charming brand of wit and irreverence. By the time she moved to New York for grad school, at Columbia’s Teachers College, she had amassed a following in the tens of thousands.
There was something particularly unsettling for Russell about trying to process news while scrolling through TikTok. “It made me feel icky,” she told me recently. “I didn’t feel like I was actually consuming anything.” Around this time, her therapist offered some advice: do something that would make the child version of yourself happy. “I thought about how I used to read almanacs, the Guinness Book of World Records, and newspapers,” she said—“and it clicked.” She asked her parents for a print subscription to the New York Times—“it was what my dad always read,” she says—and it turned out to be a revelation. Soon, Russell was extolling the virtues of print media online. “I just told my TikTok followers, Guys, this news is really interesting, and it’s way more fun to read it like this,” she said. “I feel like I learned way more about the world just reading the newspaper for fifteen minutes than if I aggregated all the stuff on social media.” She started selecting articles to share with her followers, showing up in their feeds with annotated copies of various newspapers and magazines, and unpacking everything from the congressional budget to the history of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.
The reception was overwhelmingly positive. “So many people didn’t even know you could still get a newspaper subscription,” she said. Within two years, her audience ballooned to well over a hundred thousand followers. Sales teams at different publications started reaching out to her, offering subscriptions. Journalists wrote to her asking her to feature their articles. What started off as a casual experiment became a mission to promote media literacy, and to make the news feel fun and accessible to a generation that the industry continues to struggle to engage. Last year, she landed a job as a presenter for First Stop News, an online channel funded by a private donor named Robin van Bokhorst that caters to kids. It’s a role, she says, that complements her work as an influencer. “The show is exactly in line with my own mission and purpose: How can we enjoy information? Or, How can you make learning fun? This show targets the exact demographic that is the most important.”
Recently, I met Russell in the First Stop studio in Manhattan, where we discussed opportunities for collaboration between influencers and reporters, why democracy depends on journalists, and what sitcoms can teach us about the importance of local news. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
YRG: With so many stories that you could cover, how do you choose which articles you want to highlight? How do you decide if a story is well suited for your channel?
KR: The first thing is it needs to interest me. If the first four paragraphs don’t really grab me, then I’m not going to share it. My genuine excitement is important, not only for my audience, but for my video to do well. I also look for something that introduces me to a new topic, but feels comfortable; if we want to start talking about stocks and bonds, that could be uncomfortable for people, but what if [the article] talks about that in the context of Walmart? It’s something that we’ve all experienced. Another example was this article about how politicized sports podcasting has become. Sports used to be this one place where politics was not discussed, and now you see that people who have certain political beliefs only listen to certain sports podcasts. As somebody who loves sports, I was like, Oh, this is the type of article that hits everything. Let’s talk about it. [Articles about] fashion also do really well, especially if they have to do with how the material things that we wear showcase what’s going on in the world. That’s a theme that I gravitate to, as well as anything that has to do with social justice, Black experiences, women’s history—untold stories, basically.
You’ve spoken on your channel about your belief that print media is a healthier way to consume news than social media. What do you mean by that?
It’s about emotional regulation. Our algorithms are aggregated to show us things that will make us pay attention, and many times those things are negative. When we receive news that makes us feel really sad or really angry, what do we do with that emotion? I found that I would just feel overwhelmed: I didn’t know what to do with it, I didn’t know how to sit with it. But I realized when I read print, I would actually process what I was reading and make a decision, like Oh, maybe I should go on a walk because that made me feel bad. Maybe I could tear up the paper. If I read about something awful going on in part of the world, the next article in the next section might be about something like Why is it that ankle socks are back in fashion? And that makes me feel good.
One of the interesting things about your work is that you’re advocating that young people engage more with print media but doing it on a digital platform. Do you see that as a paradox?
People ask me about that. I think it’s all about meeting people where they are. The tale that’s been told is that old people read newspapers and young people get all of their news on TikTok. But why can’t those mediums exist in the same [space]? I don’t think that they’re two separate things; I think they should talk to each other. If I’m scrolling on TikTok and getting a lot of my information there, but I know that there’s better, more researched information, then it would make sense to share it on the platform that the people that look like me—that walk and talk like me—are on. So it’s a paradox, but I also think it’s an opportunity for forms of media to not see each other as enemies. They have to work together.
In your videos, you focus on the content of the articles you’re explaining, but you also don’t shy away from political commentary. How do you decide when and how to insert your own analysis?
We live in a world where everything is political. The newspaper I choose to read from is political. The idea that I’m saying that I want people to be educated, that I want us to protect the press, is political in and of itself. So it’s important for me to be like, There are certain things I agree with and certain things I don’t agree with. It’s just a decision I make when it feels right.
These days, the question of how to monetize news is on everyone’s mind. The New York Times and other news outlets that you draw from pay their reporters, but their work often only reaches younger audiences through social media companies, which, of course, don’t pay the journalists. What do you think about that dynamic?
It’s a sticky situation where influencers almost just take the work that reporters are getting paid for and put it on their platforms and get way more numbers. What I say to that is that it’s really important to remember that reporters and influencers don’t need to be enemies. I don’t think of myself as a reporter. I think of myself as a storyteller. I think of myself as a bridge between journalism and people. Reporters have the actual knowledge; they have the ability to go out and ask questions. But I can communicate a piece of information in a way that’s really intriguing. We have to have a relationship. Does that mean that every month you all have a roundtable with creators where you’re like, Hey, how can we tell these stories more interestingly? or, We saw your content, and we wanna help you use different language so you don’t get yourself in trouble? Or is it that you invite creators to dinners or you invite them to conferences? I think it’s about building a relationship and realizing that both people have really good skills, but also are lacking skills that the others have. Recently, I gave a keynote at the National Press Foundation, and many of the journalists [I met] were saying that it feels like the institutions they work for are asking them to do a whole other job by wanting them to make videos. They were talking about how what I do is such a struggle for them, and I was like, I can’t imagine doing what you all do.
What are the main critiques you’ve heard about your approach?
I get a lot of critiques about the sources I’m reading. If I’m [discussing an article in] the New York Times, it’s Why are you reading a paper whose leadership believes in this or that? With the Wall Street Journal: Why are you reading a paper that’s more conservative? I also get a lot of flak from people saying, I don’t trust the media. Newspapers just aren’t true, so why are you spreading this kind of stuff? I always ask them, like, What media are you talking about? Who is that? Who is she? Who is the media? But I also remember that those are usually people who don’t feel like their stories are reflected in [traditional] media. I think the saddest thing that’s happened in media is the loss of local coverage. I tell my audiences [to think about it in terms of why sitcoms work so well]. The characters are so unique but also so relatable. You can relate to the worst of them; you can really relate to the best of them. That’s what local news does for people: it gives them stories that they can relate to, that matter to them. But imagine when those things are taken away—how sad it feels when there’s no representation of yourself. That’s what happens when you take away local news. People feel like they’ve been left behind, and they’re angry. And those are the hardest people to talk to, because it sucks talking to an angry person.
Why do you think news literacy is important for young people?
Journalism is the second line of defense in democracy. The fact that we live in a place where we have journalists who can go and report on what is happening is an absolute privilege. I feel like, if we don’t consume news properly—if we don’t understand that that’s something that’s very important to actually having a functioning democracy—we’ll end up with citizens who don’t care about civics, who don’t believe in their country, who become divided. It’s important because how we function as a country, as a society, is by knowing what’s going on, knowing where to look for information, knowing when things have gotten bad.
Other notable stories:
- Original Sin, a newsy book about former president Joe Biden’s decline by the Axios reporter Alex Thompson and CNN anchor Jake Tapper, formally came out yesterday, and continues to drive the news cycle, as does the diagnosis of an aggressive form of prostate cancer that Biden revealed over the weekend. Yesterday, the authors sat for an interview with the right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly, who pressed Tapper, in particular, on his supposedly lacking past coverage of Biden’s acuity; Tapper disputed some particulars, but generally sounded contrite, and revealed that he’d apologized to Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, after shutting down a talking point about Biden’s cognitive state in 2020. For CJR, Richard J. Tofel reviewed Original Sin, and dissected what it has to say—and doesn’t—about the past media coverage of Biden’s age and acuity.
- Theodore Schleifer, of the New York Times, reports on a number of nascent attempts among Democratic strategists, chastened by Trump’s apparent dominance of online spaces, to persuade party donors to invest in an equivalent liberal infrastructure and “to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, ‘find the next Joe Rogan.’” Democrats “widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts,” Schleifer writes. But skeptics warn that “casually right-leaning touchstones like Mr. Rogan’s podcast were not built by political donors and did not rise overnight,” and that a herd mentality “could cause money to flow into projects that are not fully fleshed out.”
- On Sunday Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the right-wing attack dogs (and, in the latter case, former Fox star) whom Trump installed atop the FBI, did an interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo during which they tried to tamp down MAGA conspiracy theories around Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide and the assassination attempts against Trump. Despite this, on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, took a question from a staffer at a conspiratorial site who raised Epstein’s case. This was “an utter waste” of a question, The Bulwark’s Will Sommer writes, but it also illuminated a key trend of Trump 2.0: “The conspiracists whom Trump has long fostered…are growing impatient.”
- Last week, the party of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian leader, introduced a draconian new bill that would allow the authorities to clamp down on, and potentially even ban, news outlets and other civil-society groups that receive funding from abroad and are deemed to have infringed upon national sovereignty or culture—drawing comparisons to restrictive Russian legislation clamping down on so-called “foreign agents.” Over the weekend, protesters rallied against the bill in Budapest, and dozens of editors from across Europe have now signed a petition opposing it.
- And in yesterday’s newsletter, we wrote about George Simion, the defeated far-right candidate in Romania’s recent presidential election—which was rerun after an earlier vote was annulled over claims of Russian meddling—who initially made Trump-like claims of fraud, only to then concede defeat. Later in the day, however, Simion said that he would challenge the result in court after all—alleging that foreign nations including France interfered with the vote, including by “directing media narratives,” and touting support from Pavel Durov, the CEO of the messaging app Telegram. Politico has more.
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