As the de facto ban on TikTok careened to completion in mid-January, Minnesota Public Radio News reporter and producer Feven Gerezgiher felt the urge to rewatch “Who TF Did I Marry?” a viral series of videos about an alleged pathological liar ex-husband.

Anne Guttridge, the video producer at MPR News, increased her time scrolling TikTok, thinking, “Oh, I’m gonna miss this.”

And Kaila White, an MPR News digital editor who oversees Gerezgiher and Guttridge (and a self-defined TikTok power user), felt surprised at the end of an era.

Personal feelings aside, the journalists might have also worried professionally about the Chinese-owned vertical video app going dark. While launching Reverb, the new young adult section at MPR News, they’d put a lot of work into vertical video as part of a critical strategy to reach new audiences online.

In 2024, MPR News published an average of one video every other day to nearly 40,000 TikTok followers, generating 2.7 million likes. And as the ban loomed, that audience was about to go “poof.”

But on Jan. 18, when TikTok shut down, Reverb stayed calm.

“It was kind of like, ‘OK, let’s keep an eye on what’s going on, but we’re not going to freak out,’” Guttridge said. “Maybe we wait two days to figure out if this is still an app that exists…but other than that, it wasn’t super crazy.”

They didn’t have to wait long. President Donald Trump stepped in to pause the ban until early April, and TikTok started functioning again. In the meantime, China and the U.S. are struggling to work out a deal for an American company to buy the app — otherwise, the ban will still happen.

The Ides of TikTok is making influencers and businesses worry about their livelihoods, and pushing some users to jump ship to other Chinese-owned apps.

But Reverb’s stoicism marks a new reality for news organizations, like MPR News, investing in social video. Basically, there’s no need to panic. 

“We figured out our vertical video voice through TikTok, because that was just the place where we could [experiment],” said Gerezgiher. “But that style works on other platforms.”

Though TikTok became synonymous with vertical video on social media, its success has been copied by juggernaut platforms like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Even Bluesky, the Twitter-alternative of the moment, has launched a vertical video feed.

That means vertical video, much like text or photos, is now platform-agnostic.

So even without TikTok, there’s an audience for Reverb’s work. The MPR News Instagram page, for example, has more than four times the follower count of its TikTok page — and more engagement with video there.

For White, the focus on vertical video is also about a larger evolution at MPR News, as the organization works to be more intentional about reaching audiences online. 

Having “an audience-first mindset, and thinking at the beginning of the story process, ‘How can I serve audiences on different platforms, and what would that entail?’ [That’s important] no matter what platforms are currently popular,” White said. “It helps our work be better.”

In that bigger picture, TikTok’s status is only one of the challenges Reverb is dealing with.

“I don’t know that I have ever felt particularly concerned about the tumultuous nature of being on TikTok,” White said. “Our mission…and our goals transcend that.”

Very demure, very mindful

Reverb started as an informal initiative in fall 2022, after a tumultuous period of layoffs and internal reorganizing at American Public Media Group, MPR’s parent company. 

White had just joined MPR News after several years at the Arizona Republic. Soon, she was approached by new executive editor Jane Helmke.

“She had this idea of wanting to experiment with ways to reach younger adults,” White said. “And she was very open to what that could look like.”

Social video seemed like the smart bet. MPR News had just started its TikTok account, and increasingly, young adults were getting their news on the video app. In 2022, a quarter of Americans 18-29 years old were regularly getting news on TikTok (by 2024, 40% of young adults were doing so).

Gerezgiher joined the team early on to kick off the vertical video experiments. She focused on the 2022 midterm elections as a kind of test drive for 2024 election coverage.

As Gerezgiher interviewed young adults about the midterms, it was also a way to survey “how coverage has been operating, to then think about what it needs to look like for a younger audience,” she said.

With few TikTok followers, the proto-Reverb team could try just about anything to develop a clear social video identity. 

Among the questions they worked through: Did they want the MPR News video voice to be more authoritative, or casual? Would they focus on explaining broader trends, or translate actual MPR stories into self-contained videos? And how would they find the right  balance of entertaining videos with serious reporting?

Hiring Guttridge, as MPR News’ first ever video-only producer, helped solidify some answers as well as the pipeline for video creation. Now, video is recorded on iPhones, alongside audio for radio, and both are edited together by Guttridge using Adobe Premiere Pro. 

But another important consideration is that “video is not always the answer,” Guttridge said. “We’re having discussions like, ‘Could we get views? Sure, but would [the story] stay true to what we want to represent?’”

As for the MPR video approach, it is generally more relaxed and fun, with video acting as a self-contained way to tell a story for viewers (rather than serving as a tease to direct viewers to the site). That’s the secret sauce — if a video is engaging, it will work across social media with no platform-specific editing.

Popular videos include coverage of the annual Wedge neighborhood cat tour, and the local rumor mill about reality TV show “Love Is Blind.” Profiles of local celebrities have also been a hit, like the “Queen Spinner of Shell Shock,” a woman who went viral for mastering an amusement ride at the Mall of America based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The top two TikTok comments on that video are: “Now this is REAL journalism,” liked over 21,000 times, and “I miss human interest pieces like this,” liked over 9,000 times.

But the team, which includes reporter Nicole Ki and digital producer Sam Stroozas, has also used video to highlight serious reporting. That includes interviews with survivors of the 2023 shooting at Nudieland, the Minneapolis punk music venue, where one person was killed and six others injured.

“We can…be really sensitive, and take time, and care, and show people that we are being authentic in these stories,” Guttridge said.

Racking up views and engagement, MPR’s marketing division took notice. They decided to brand the group’s work as a young adult vertical, and in May 2024, officially launched Reverb.

Later that year, a Minnesota Journalism Center study took a closer look at how effective Reverb’s work is. A group of Minnesotans who previously didn’t follow the MPR News Instagram account did so during the election and reported back about their perception of the organization.

“We found significant increases in the percentage who trusted MPR News at the end of the study,” said Benjamin Toff, director of the MJC and an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. There were also “some increases in loyalty to MPR News, valuing the specific content that MPR is producing.”

In a series of focus groups the MJC ran for both MPR News and the Texas Tribune, Toff also found that while many people strongly dislike social media, they feel it’s the only avenue to be informed about the world.

“There’s a whole generation of people who’ve been socialized into assuming that this is the way they’re going to get news,” said Toff, who also serves on MinnPost’s board. “It’s a positive thing that there’s a lot more experimentation going on in terms of how to deliver news in this format.”

Reverb online video

Now that they’re established, Reverb is also about integrating the rest of MPR into the vertical video pipeline. That means thinking about how to record and structure a video before doing interviews, not after.

“We have a fairly hands-on approach to working with other reporters, many of whom often start out really reluctant to be on video; or they say, ‘I worked in TV, and I left it for a reason,’” White said. “We end up coaching them through it, and they always find it to be a really enjoyable experience.”

Each reporter who successfully makes vertical video becomes a kind of ambassador to other hesitant reporters. And success is stacking up: In 2024, White said that 25 different staff members appeared on MPR social videos — and viewers are definitely paying attention.

“There was a producer here whose friends had told her, ‘Do you even work at MPR? Because I’ve never seen you on the [MPR Instagram page],’” Gerezgiher said. “Our larger strategy of being [on social media] is that we’re reaching different people, and we would like them to be able to trust reporters of different backgrounds and beats.”

More experimenting is in the cards: White has considered expanding Reverb’s work into longer-form videos for YouTube (by far the most popular social media platform). Video could also be better integrated with studio interviews, rather than just field reporting.

There’s also a larger, fundamental aspect of vertical video that Reverb and MPR have to figure out: Sustainability. 

The investment into social video has been minor — Guttridge is the only employee who works full-time on it — while audience engagement has grown dramatically. But in practical terms, the Reverb team is spending time and effort on videos that are served for free to audiences across social media. 

Social platforms, meanwhile, are actively hostile both to news organizations and to users leaving their platforms to, say, visit a site, or sign up for a newsletter, or donate. 

Instagram, for example, doesn’t allow links in posts or vertical videos. Instead, there’s a “link in bio” at the top of an account page — though it seems users are unlikely to use it.

“Almost everybody said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m not going to do that,’” found Toff, the MJC director, during the focus groups he ran. “Making it very clear what that next step can be for people [to support news] is, I think, a big challenge.”

Then again, this isn’t the first platform sustainability rodeo for MPR. There’s no donate button on a dashboard radio, let alone links to a newsletter, for example.

So how will the social video audience translate to support for the journalists who report the news and make the videos?

“In the state of media right now, the first fight is for relevance,” White said. She thinks the social audience can be converted to real MPR support, though that will also take its own experimenting with the membership team.

Gerezgiher and Guttridge agree, pointing to social video as a long-term strategy for the next generation of MPR members. 

“I do think young people will pay for things, we just haven’t asked them to,” Gerezgiher said.  But “the first thing to do before you’re like, ‘Give me money,’ is [to explain], who are you? Why should I even be here?”

For younger audiences to invest, they have to trust MPR, see it as reliable, and understand its value. That’s why the funny and locally interesting videos are so important: They make sure people stay engaged, and don’t tune out entirely because of how overwhelming news can be.

Analytics seem to show that approach is working.

“We have a high engagement rate and audience growth with our social video and Instagram accounts, which helps us ensure our journalism is reaching key audiences,” said Michael Olson, the deputy managing editor for digital at MPR News, in a statement to MinnPost.

For Guttridge, sustainability is about growing up with a young audience that might not yet be in a financial position to support MPR. “In college, I was not donating to my local [public radio] station, but if I had TikTok…I would have been following and paying attention,” she said.

Reverb is “building those audiences so that, when they do feel like they’re ready to invest in a membership or something, they’ve already had that trust with us for a long time.”

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