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The Washington Post‘s former face of Tiktok has said his decision to launch his own company was because video was not “getting the support it needed to thrive” at the title.
Dave Jorgenson was senior video producer at the Post between 2017 and 2025, and was responsible for launching the paper’s Tiktok channel in 2019. He left the title in July 2025, announcing the launch of Local News International (LNI) in the same month.
In a video posted at the time, he addressed Post owner Jeff Bezos: “I’ll still be posting shorts and Tiktoks five days a week, as well as monthly long-form videos. We’ll have a newsletter and some neat partnerships too.”
LNI was also founded by ex-Post deputy director for video Lauren Saks and director of video Micah Gelman, who left at the same time as Jorgenson.
Jorgenson told Press Gazette LNI is “basically trying to get all those followers” he amassed at the Post, and this has been “very effective quite quickly”.
“Our traffic was going up really high and, unfortunately for the Post, their social traffic was getting lower – which I think was a good sign that we found that audience, and we’re building even more people that hadn’t followed us elsewhere.”
LNI has more than 220,000 followers on Tiktok and 258,000 Youtube subscribers. Jorgenson’s Instagram account, posting LNI content, has more than 92,000 followers. Its newsletter, sent twice a week, has 13,000 free subscribers.
“Now we’re excited to start doing long-form content in addition to what we’re doing with short-form,” he said, adding that LNI is also aiming to be profitable in the next year.
Post cuts ‘hard to watch’
LNI was “partially” created “because it was very clear that video was not getting the support or anything that it needed to thrive” at The Post – “and I think that’s clearly the case now,” he said.
In a memo to the Post staff last week, executive editor Matt Murray said: “Some areas, such as video, haven’t kept up with changes in how consumers get news and information”.
It is not known how many video staff were included in the cuts.
Jorgenson said: “It’s really hard to watch from the outside and the only kind of solace I’ve taken is all these people, especially [in] video… they’re definitely gonna land somewhere.”
In the two months following Jorgenson’s departure, views for the Washington Post Universe Youtube channel (which Jorgenson produced videos for) dropped significantly, according to research published on Substack by Matt Karolian in October 2025.
Views dropped by 85% from its peak in April (54 million views) to 8.2 million views in September 2025, two months after Jorgenson’s exit.
According to Press Gazette analysis of Youtube channels, in January 2026 LNI reached an average of 1.5 million views across its 14 videos (22.4 million total views), compared to The Washington Post’s 148,000 average views across 139 videos (20.7 million total views) and The Washington Post Universe’s 355,000 average views across nine videos (3.2 million total views).
On TikTok, LNI reached 169,000 average views across 13 videos in January, totalling 2.2 million views overall. The Washington Post Universe had higher average views across the month at 242,000 for its eight videos, totalled 1.9 million views overall.
The Tiktok account for Washington Post Live has not been updated since October 2025.
‘Aimless ship at sea’
The memo also noted that “nearly all” news departments were being affected, while sports (around 45 people) and books departments are vastly cutting back the number of correspondents operating outside the US.
Jorgenson said: “The feeling that you’re getting of the confusion of, like, why would they do this? That’s how it felt to work there, and we never really had any clear answers.
“And that seems to continue to be the case. It’s just a symptom of the leadership up top,” he added, citing Murray and former publisher and CEO Will Lewis.
“They’re there but they don’t really seem to have a clear vision and they don’t inspire confidence in people. But I just think this is just a symptom of this aimless ship at sea.”
Days after cuts were made (and after Jorgenson spoke to Press Gazette), Lewis stepped down from the paper.
While major layoffs at the Post have sparked conversation about industry decline, Jorgenson said it could be related to not investing in non-news products and adapting effectively to the digital age.
“Everyone keeps making this comparison… The New York Times is kind of the example of what to do… they identified five [or] six years ago that we need to have other products that aren’t just news products,” he said.
“And they really went into Wordle and made even more games and they’ve grown this larger media company that also helps to support the news section too.”
[Read more: Puzzled: How games help power The New York Times subscription model]
Jorgenson added: “And what I see at the Post is that no one’s really listening to each other… to the journalists and even mid-level managers who are saying, ‘no, we should really do this’. That’s what I can continue to hear.
“And that’s a bummer. But The Times is doing that, and I think other places can do that. So I think it’s just this growing pain moment of trying to bring news into a new era.”
LNI has expanded into non-news products itself with a consulting arm for other media companies, an area covered by Saks and Gelman.
“We have – between us – 50 years of experience in video from… cable news… to newspapers to PBS, so all three of us bring that to the table,” said Jorgenson.
Tiktok ownership changes spark user instability
Some US Tiktok creators are reassessing their future on the platform following claims of censorship, glitching and revenue changes.
These changes have come amid the app’s US operations being transferred from Chinese parent company Bytedance to US investors beginning 22 January.
One news influencer Dylan Page, who operates under the name News Daddy, announced he would briefly leave the platform as a “form of protest” due to censorship, claiming he had five videos removed in two days, and a drop in revenue per 1,000 page views to “the lowest amount possible”.
Glitches, such as videos skipping, also occurred on the app for a week, which Tiktok blamed on weather damage at one of its data centres.
Jorgenson said while he thinks the glitching was “legitimate”, “I think the censorship is happening”.
Users have claimed particular content, such as involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has been targeted for censorship.
Jorgenson said comments on LNI’s videos inform him of glitches or, “more interestingly”, automatic scrolling before videos are finished.
“And that, to me, is a little bit stranger,” he said, calling this “shadowbanning”.
“You can’t prove it… but the one thing that’s definitely different is that none of our videos take off right away… it’s definitely not working the same way it was a month ago.”
Jorgenson has not noticed a change to revenue, and added LNI will continue to produce content anyway.
“It’s all kind of random what gets suppressed at times anyway… if you work too hard one direction, trying to make it something that is appealing to the algorithm, you end up just making content that isn’t good anyway,” he said.
The post How Dave Jorgenson took the Washington Post video audience with him appeared first on Press Gazette.
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