On a recent Wednesday in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, Moshe Onunou, a former producer for CBS, Bloomberg News and Fox News, took to Instagram. He had started his morning by reading major newspapers and over a dozen newsletters. He then spent much of the day turning many of the articles into posts on his Instagram account, under the handle Mo News.
A Wall Street Journal story about aging Americans was conveyed through an image of a cake that said, “A record number of Americans will turn 65 this year: rich, active and free.” At times, Mr. Oinonu, an affable 41-year-old, has also appeared on camera with the co-host of his daily news podcast to explain the importance of how Republican presidential candidates vote and why President Biden is writing. candidate in New Hampshire.
The content has earned Mo News 436,000 Instagram followers, turning what was a pandemic project into a business with three full-time employees and a larger footprint. In December, the State Department granted Mo News an interview with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Mr. Oinounou said the agency told him: “We understand how people get their news.”
“People are very judgmental and cynical about the information they get from traditional outlets,” Mr. Oinounou said in an interview. “It resonates where this guy on Instagram breaks down the news.”
Mr. Oinounou is among a group of personalities who have figured out how to package information and broadcast it on Instagram, increasingly turning the social platform into a news powerhouse. Many millennials and Gen X-ers, in an echo of how older generations used Facebook, have become more comfortable reading news on Instagram and retweeting posts and videos about friends in Instagram Stories, which disappear after 24 hours.
Traditional news organizations, including the New York Times, have large Instagram feeds where they share reports, but these news accounts have a different appeal and have become more visible in recent years.
They curate content like old-school blogs and talk to the camera like TikTok and YouTube influencers. They source titles from many major outlets while adding their own analysis. They talk to followers in the comments and direct messages, using the comments and questions to shape additional posts. Many promise to be non-partisan.
“For a lot of people, they have the chefs they trust, the doctors they trust, and then there’s a category of news and information they trust,” said Jessica Yelin, former chief White House correspondent for CNN. Ms Yellin, who has more than 650,000 followers on her news Instagram account and a media brand called News Not Noise, calls herself an “information source”.
All of this makes Instagram, which is owned by Meta, an increasingly important news outlet in this year’s US presidential election. As of last year, 16 percent of US adults regularly got news on Instagram, surpassing TikTok, X and Reddit, and up from 8 percent in 2018, according to Pew Research. More than half of this group were women.
News influencers have become popular on Instagram, even as the platform has tried to weed out political content. Instagram and its sister platform, Facebook, have been plagued by accusations of spreading misinformation and fueling political debate. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has denied working with or promoting the app’s news accounts.
This month, Mr Mosseri said Instagram would not recommend “political content” in different parts of the app unless users choose to see it. The platform said political content included posts that were “potentially related to things like laws, elections or social issues.”
In the week after Mr. Mosseri’s announcement, news accounts saw a drop in shares, comments, likes, reach and video views, according to an analysis by Dash Hudson, a social media management company. Shares of posts from 70 major news accounts on Instagram, including the Times and NPR, fell 26 percent each week on average, according to the company.
In protest, Ms Yellin made a video denouncing Instagram’s changes and wrote in her newsletter that the moves would “inevitably affect how well informed the electorate is and could have far-reaching implications for the future of media and even of democracy”.
An Instagram spokeswoman declined to comment beyond Mr. Mosseri’s statements. Mr Mosseri has previously praised some news influencers for their work. He follows a Mo News subscribers-only account on Instagram.
Other prominent news influencers on Instagram include Sharon McMahon, 46, a former high school teacher in Duluth, Minn., who has attracted more than a million followers by explaining the fundamentals of government; There are more overtly political influencers, like Emily Amick, 39, a lawyer with more than 134,000 followers. Other news accounts include Roca News, founded by 20-somethings who see Instagram as a key way to reach peers who feel alienated from traditional news media.
Ms McMahon said she was inspired to start the news account on Instagram after seeing misinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election. She recently posted maps of immigration encounters on the US southern border sourced from Customs and Border Protection on her Instagram account, garnering more than 30,000 likes, as well as an interview with Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota who is a long-term challenger to President Biden.
“I don’t really see myself as a journalist, but more as a teacher,” Ms McMahon said. “I’m explaining what’s going on instead of taking a scoop, digging up history and making sources.”
Instagram is a starting point for expanding into newsletters and podcasts, where accounts can earn money from ads or subscriptions. Many news influencers also accept paid sponsorship deals that they embed in Instagram posts. Ms. McMahon runs a private book club for subscribers — which has a waiting list to join — and offers paid video workshops to learn more about government and current political issues.
Ms. Yellin, the former CNN correspondent, began posting news on Instagram in 2018 around the time of Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings at the Supreme Court. She tracked people down about what had happened in the hearings and published explainers during the Trump administration, including setting terms such as sanctions for her followers.
Ms. Yellin’s rise has helped celebrity fans like Jessica Seinfeld and Amy Schumer. Ms Seinfeld, who has around 600,000 followers on Instagram, contacted Ms Yellin’s news account and urged people to follow her.
“My idea was that we can attract those who avoid the news, and we can also attract people who are partly attentive to the news but panicked by it,” said Ms. Yellin, who has five full- and part-time employees.
Her ethos for delivering news on Instagram is summed up by her tagline: “We’re giving you information, not a panic attack.”
When the White House threw a kick-off holiday party for Internet influencers last year, Mr. Oinounou, Ms. Yellin and Ms. Amick were among the guests. Christian Thom, director of the White House office of digital strategy, who helped come up with the idea for the party, said the administration regularly worked with news accounts on Instagram.
“There are so many accounts that share news and information that have an audience of millions of people who may not hear from the White House or follow the White House at all,” he said.
Mr. Tom pointed to early Instagram news brands like @Impact and @Betches_News, meme and entertainment accounts like @Pubity, and progressive media outlets like MeidasTouch and More Perfect Union.
“Each generation makes these tools and uses them in their own way,” he said.
Even with Instagram’s changes to news content, users will still see news from the accounts they already follow and through their friends’ Stories.
“Everyone has become somewhat of a broadcaster or a source of information for their friends and family,” Mr. Oinounou said.
Ms Amick said she had watched her peers engage with news on Instagram as “social media apps have become stratified by generation”. She considers herself something of an “opinionist,” rather than a news source like Mo News or Ms. Yellin, and sees Instagram as a place to mobilize millennial women around issues like reproductive rights.
“My friends who are millennial moms are busy — they have jobs, they have kids, they have to put food on the table,” she said. “They don’t have tons of extra time to consume news and they were already on Instagram. So this is a way for them to be able to consume news through a way that they already use.”
