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A Black woman is going viral for breaking down print newspapers on TikTok.
Kelsey Russell, 23, has garnered nearly 90,000 TikTok followers and over 5 million likes on her videos where she goes through articles from physical copies of newspapers and explains them, per NPR.
"I got a subscription to the Sunday New York Times physical copy for my birthday, and I think that bad Gen Z biddies should read the newspaper," Russell says in one of her videos.
Russell is informing her followers and bridging the growing gap between social media users and print news. The 23-year-old said she started to read the news after finishing her first year of graduate school at Columbia University.
"I really felt like I knew nothing. I was struggling to connect what was going on outside of the world to my studies," Russell told NPR.
Russell said she struggled with reading from a small cellphone screen so she began to get her news from print newspapers, like she did when she was a kid.
"When I was growing up in elementary and middle school, I would sit down [and] read the newspaper," she said. "My dad would do the same. My mom would do the same. So I said, 'Let me just go back to what made me happy as a child.'"
"And I realized when I read the news on print, I actually had time to process what was going on," Russell continued. "And when I would read the same article on my phone I would find my body [was] overwhelmed."
Russell said she tries to read at least one newspaper a day, and she breaks down the articles to her TikTok followers.
"I'm also looking for an article that has words or people, actors, places that I have to look up in order to understand the article more, because I'm a person that believes in letting go of that shame of the unknown," she said.
The young adult is using her newfound platform to spread media literacy at grade schools as she continues to make her TikTok videos.
"All of this has catapulted me into a low- to mid-level tier of fame, of influencing, which has led so many newspapers to send me their newspapers," Russell said.
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