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Age really is just a number when it comes to social media, as new research from Ampere Analysis shows that more than half of users ages 55 to 64 now watch influencer content every week. This number is up by 10 percentage points since 2020. In the U.K., the figure has also risen over the past five years, from 30% to 38%. TikTok and YouTube, in particular, are behind the growthproof that Boomers social media presence is no longer limited to Facebook. The biggest surprise in our latest data wasnt how popular influencer videos have become, it is how rapidly this trend has extended to older audiences, Annabel Yeomans, senior research manager at Ampere Analysis, said in a statement on December 1. That age group55 to 64delivered the highest growth in YouTubes monthly viewing from the first quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of 2025, up by 25% in the U.S. and 14% in the U.K. In the past year alone, TikToks monthly active users grew 6% in the U.S. and 16% in the U.K. among audiences ages 55 to 64. The growing popularity of influencer content with older viewers comes as YouTube has established itself as a living-room viewing experience. More than a quarter (29%) now use a smart TV monthly to watch YouTube, as smart TV ownership among internet users ages 55 to 64 in the U.K. and the U.S. is up 20 percentage points since the pandemic, jumping from 59% to 79%. As viewing habits diversify and platforms like YouTube and TikTok become part of living-room viewing, the lines between social and traditional platforms are blurring, Yeomans said. Streaming platforms have responded by partnering with influencers on premium content, as Netflix has with kids educator Rachel Anne Accursos Ms. Rachel videos and Amazon has with Molly-Mae Hagues docuseries, Molly-Mae: Behind It All. And yet, just 15% of older consumers globally feel represented in the advertising they see, according to GWI, jumping to 20% for those who follow brands or influencers on social media. To fill this gap, the number of so-called granfluencers is also increasing. These older creators represent a fast-growing demographic of social media users, and thus are starting to catch marketers attention. New opportunities for collaboration across different platform types are emerging, Yeomans said. Streaming services are increasingly partnering with influencers, an approach that first attracted younger viewers and is now gaining traction among older audiences.
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There’s a lot of chatter right now about an AI bubble, fueled in part by a perception that productivity gains from AI are largely illusory. I can’t speak to the market, and whether AI is broadly overvalued or undervalued, but I can tell you that in the past year alone, AI has completely transformed how I work. Looking at the tools today that didn’t exist a year agodeep research, browser agents, the big leaps in performance for all the latest modelsthere’s a host of ways AI can speed up or enhance many tasks of knowledge workers, especially journalists. As an independent journalist, I’m perhaps a little less constrained than most (my AI policy is whatever I want it to be), and AI has made me rethink how every part of the job gets done. So bubble or not, that shift is already here. To better articulate this and highlight tools and techniques that are broadly useful, I’ve broken down several ways I use AI in my writing, researching, and reporting. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} The most intuitive way to organize this is by walking through the story processfrom developing ideas to hitting publish to sharing on social media. Here are 10 ways I use AI as a journalist and content creator: Beat monitoring: The set of stories that any individual reporter needs to keep up with is different, and AI’s ability to personalize and summarize is extremely helpful here. I find ChatGPT Pulsewhich doesn’t just compile stories, but explains why they’re relevant to your work and includes other personal info (like your schedule)to be extremely helpful, but it’s also constrained to the Pro plan ($200/month). A stripped-down, but still useful tool is scheduled tasks in ChatGPT or Perplexity, where you craft a prompt that searches for the latest stories you’re interested in and sends it to your inbox. Accelerated skimming: Once I land on an article that I’m interested in, I often read the summary before deciding if I want to spend the time reading. There’s a dedicated button for this in Perplexity’s Comet browser, and there are a host of browser extensions that do this for Chrome. On X, I find the ability to simply reply to any post with “@grok what is this post about?” for a short, instant explanation to be a huge time-saver, especially for memes and trends I’m seeing for the first time. Going deeper: When Google’s NotebookLM made its big splash last fall with its ability to create instant conversational podcasts, many dismissed it as a gimmick. But I find the feature to be an incredibly useful tool for getting primed on a topic or news story. You can either drop a single URL in the folder or use the new Fast Research feature to find a story, generate your audio overview, and boomyou have a short podcast all about the thing you’re researching. Listen at 1.5x speed to blaze through it even faster. Story ideas: Finding the connections and missing angles in between stories will always be a mostly human-driven process, but NotebookLM is a good partner here as well. Prompting it to suggest story ideas based on the questions implied or not answered in the set of articles in the notebook is often a great starting point for a story idea. Getting in the weeds: Once I know the idea I’m running with, it’s time to research. AI is obviously great at this, specifically the deep research tools that have emerged in the past year. I use them all, but differently: Perplexity is excellent for a first passit’s fast, but typically not as thorough as the others. I generally find Gemini to be the best at finding sources on the web, but less great at prioritizing them. My go-to for serious research is ChatGPT, which I find to be the most thorough. It’s also excellent for turning its deep research abilities inwarddirecting them at a large set of files in a Google Drive or Dropbox folder (via Connectors). Targeting highly specific information: When the key to your story is a singular document or piece of data, it’s helpful to outsource the task of finding it to a browser agent. For example, court documents are typically kept in hard-to-navigate services like PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). Just finding the right case often involves performing several searches, especially if you’re unsure of the exact names involved or the specific court. When given clear tasks like this, a browser agent like Comet or ChatGPT Atlas is the perfect research intern, usually finding exactly what you’re looking for in just a few minutes. Writing coach: Now that I’ve gathered and processed all the background material, it’s time to write. For my columns and original reporting, I don’t let AI write for me, but I do often use it as a coach. I’ve crafted a Custom GPT to act as an inquisitive interviewer: probing me with several questionsverballyrecording my long responses, and then assembling them all into an outline once I’m done. From there, I’m off to the races, sometimes returning to the coach when I go in an unexpected direction. The process helps me write in about half the time as before. Writing intern: I write a news igest for my Thursday newsletter, with each item coauthored by AI. For these short blurbs, I’ve built a Claude Project that’s trained on my style, the digest format, and the target audience. Once given a story or news trend, it writes a one-paragraph summary in my style, which I then edit and add to. It turns a 15-minute process into something that takes about five minutes. (And, yes, I’m fully transparent to my audience when AI acts as a coauthor.) Copy desk: Everything I write goes through my AI copy desk: First, a Custom GPT looks at it critically but constructively, suggesting edits (and sometimes further research) to make the piece stronger. Then another GPT does a proofreading pass, aimed at making it either more newsy or conversational, depending on the context. Importantly, neither GPT does automatic rewritesthey’re all suggestions that I can take or leave. Social media manager: Finally, once the piece is live, I have specific prompting that writes social copy for LinkedInboth for my personal profile and The Media Copilot company page. In this case, I don’t manually paste anything into an assistant on the web, but instead use Zapier, an automation tool that automatically generates the social post and queues it up for my review. That saves a lot of back-and-forth between browser windows and ensures I never miss a post. I hope you see a pattern in what I’ve laid out: Each process involves AI bringing things to my attention, but it prioritizes my attention. In my view, AI is an extraordinary accelerant for specific tasks in story creation, but the process needs human review and judgment throughout. And while AI can be a helpful writing “intern” for very specific formats, I keep the text in anything substantive (such as this column) human written. That human centricity will remain, no matter how intelligent and automated parts of the process get. While I don’t doubt that AI will continue to improve, the point of using it is to sharpen, accelerate, and amplify how I communicate with audienceshuman audiences. Machines can be great partners, but the moment they become the focus is when we stop communicating and are just creating “content.” The media just experienced an era dominated by SEO, algorithms, and lowest-common denominator thinking. Let’s not do that again. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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Below, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic shares five key insights from his new book, Dont Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead). Chamorro-Premuzic is the chief innovation officer at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, cofounder of Deeper Signals, and an associate at Harvards Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. Whats the big idea? Authenticity is overrated and can backfire, especially at work. Success comes from strategic self-presentation, empathy, and balancing personal freedom with responsibility to others. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Chamorro-Premuzic himselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Authenticity isnt the life hack its cracked up to be Authenticity has become one of the most celebrated traits in every single area of life, especially in the workplace. But this trenddespite its well-intentioned beginningshas not gone according to plan. What was initially supposed to free people from the pressures of conformity in the workplace is backfiring in surprising ways. Excessive praise of being ‘true to yourself’ can fuel narcissism, extreme individualism, and a disregard for obligations to others. While research in positive psychology shows that feeling aligned with ones true self can boost mood and well-being, societys obsession with authenticity has a darker side. Excessive praise of being true to yourself can fuel narcissism, extreme individualism, and a disregard for obligations to others. This cultural phenomenon often harms more than it helps, especially in professional settings. 2. The four traps of authenticity For leaders who want to be competent, effective, and create an inclusive and diverse working culture, it is important to avoid the four authenticity traps. The following mantras seem to propel beneficial behaviors, but can actually hurt objective career success: Always be honest with yourself and others. Most people think of themselves very positively, but decades of research show this self-perception is largely biased and often misaligned with how others see them. Even when we are self-aware, honesty isnt always what others want. They often prefer encouragement, positive feedback, or polite social interaction over unfiltered truth. Always stay true to your values. Following your values blindly can be dangerous if those values are harmful, destructive, or antisocial. History is full of leaders who acted consistently with their values but caused great harm. Even for ordinary people, rigid adherence to ones values can prevent self-reflection, fuel polarization, and make always follow your heart misleading advice. Dont worry about what others think. The idea that we shouldnt worry about how others see us is unrealistic because humans naturally perceive the world through others perspectives and rely on social feedback to grow. Ignoring others input may preserve a self-image of heroism, but it prevents real development as leaders, colleagues, and human beings. Bring your whole self to work. Our whole selfincluding the grumpy, impulsive, or self-centered partsis rarely fully welcomed at work, so telling people it is safe to express themselves is a bit of a trap. Organizations should focus on creating inclusive environments that balance self-expression with being a responsible, collaborative team member, recognizing where personal freedom ends and obligations to others begin. 3. Authenticity can hurt career and leadership outcomes Career and leadership success require strategic self-presentation. Rather than imposing an unedited self on others, people benefit from deliberately managing how they are perceived. This involves understanding the social context, adapting to the needs of others, and making intentional choices about what to share and how to share it. Effective impression management isnt manipulative; its a practical way to achieve real-world goals without compromising integrity. 4. Effective leadership is about managing perception Leadership is less about indulging in self-expression and more about creating value for others. Leaders must distinguish when trustworthiness becomes oversharing, understanding how to manage emotions and communicate effectively rather than engage in inappropriate self-disclosure. Authenticity without strategic awareness can lead to missteps. It is crucial that employees receive information in a way that helps them grow. Authenticity without strategic awareness can lead to missteps, whereas thoughtful communication fosters influence, loyalty, and effective collaboration. 5. Authenticity is a rare privilege Complete self-expression is often a luxury of the powerfula privilege for the elite. Only those with status can impose their unfiltered selves with fewer consequences. But for most people, this approach risks professional and social setbacks. Success comes from balancing authenticity with empathy, collaboration, and awareness of social and organizational norms. Dont just be yourself. Be strategically, responsibly, and thoughtfully yourself. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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