If the only distinction you see between this and NYT content is medium and production style, I'm more curious to know how you personally define important journalism.
There are some important differences related to consent and background info, but the high level criticism in TFA that "people are profiting by sharing imagery of fucked up drug users" is equally true of mainstream publications
It's important journalism to the extent that it disseminates information or raises awareness of important conditions or facts
To me it seems that the worst accusation you can level at a news org like NYT is reaching for sensationalism and lurid "entertainment" to get clicks.
But they are a (subjectively) trusted/credible news institution. There is an underlying mission and set of shared journalistic values behind what they do, not to mention an editorial process. Through these things there is at least a nod towards accountability.
TikTok creators are not credible or trusted in the same sense, and they are under no obligation to a larger mission or set of norms, self-imposed or otherwise. They just want followers. With content like this, it seems they're doing the inverse of the NYT - they're reaching for credibility by creating content with the appearance of journalism.
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And to your point about consent, I'm sure there are people who did not or could not consent to their image being published. AFAIK there are no structures governing TikTok "journalism" that would prevent this sort of harm. For me, this is enough to totally disqualify this sort of thing as journalism.
Platforms don't advertise it and have created a totally absurd industry where the limits of Consumption has no impact on the limits of Production. So there is no journalism going on.
Content explodes and finite Attention fragments into smaller and smaller bits so Content Producers view counts stay up with ever diluting short lived impact.
Consumption is not being measured right. If the you get a single viewer who then goes and reads 50 other things you are really getting 1/50th of that view. Self serving content producers and platforms don't talk about it at all.
It's like watching home builders debating what they are building before the subprime meltdown.
> By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all.
Information and its analysis is not equivalent to content and its consumption, nor can you extrapolate one from the other.
That you seem to use this as the sole basis for your conspiratorial findings that we're in a content bubble and "platforms don't advertise it" is unfortunate.
Journalism value lies more in surfacing data/info rather than analyzing it - an MRI tech might be able to observe and detect cancer before everyone else, but that doesn't mean they are qualified docs or cancer researchers. Or whatever they think needs to be highlighted really needs everyones attention. The platforms regularly waste everyone's time and energy.
Journos are in a similar position to the MRI tech and do call in experts to look at their data, but it all gets regularly drowned out by the info tsunami, plus experts usually need Time the more complex anything gets. The platforms profit from the expectation that what they promote, translates to action or solution instantly. And when it doesn't they don't indicate how much energy has been wasted.
The info flows have to change for more action and less unnecessary attention capture. The MRI techs are getting too much attention without an equivalent increase in lives saved.