Extra, Extra, Read All About It

Photo illustration by Slate. Images via Kelsey Russell/TikTok and paseven/iStock/Getty Images Plus. 

Slate
It’s been a bleak year for the media. Just this past spring, news companies slashed budgets and instituted widespread layoffs, with a particularly rough round of executions that culminated in the end of BuzzFeed News and Vice News Tonight. At the same time, there’s been a growing complaint that no one—least of all Gen Z—has media literacy anymore. Rampant misinformation has blurred the line between fact and fiction, and apparently, young people have lost sight of how to interpret media (that, or they never learned).

But lately, there’s been a bright spot. Kelsey Russell, a 23-year-old grad student at Columbia, has been single-handedly resuscitating the lost art of newspaper reading, with a particular emphasis on making it trendy for her Gen Z peers. “I’m just your media-literate hottie that’s gonna help you decide what print media you want to get invested in,” she tells the camera in one of her videos before diving into a copy of New York magazine.

Recently, Russell created a TikTok series chronicling what she learns each day from reading the New York Times’ physical newspaper. For her 23rd birthday, she asked her family for a subscription and made her first video about what she gleaned from the paper’s Sunday edition. “I didn’t know these kids were just stepping on bombs,” she exclaimed, walking viewers through a Times piece about the 12-year conflict in Syria that’s left behind unexploded artillery shells throughout the country. MORE