From Newspapers to TikTok: Social Media Journalism as the Fourth Wave of News Production, Diffusion and Consumption

News outlets increasingly create and disseminate news content specifically for social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Academia has thus far not given this trend the attention it deserves, with empirical and mostly conceptual contributions lacking. This chapter fills the established gap in scholarship by proposing an analytical framework that identifies social media journalism as the production, diffusion, and consumption of social media platform-bound news content. It is to be seen as the successor of print, broadcast, and digital journalism, although the chapter also argues that all four waves are occurring simultaneously rather than consecutively. In turn, this poses issues for four distinguished actors: media practitioners, media users, media regulators and media researchers.