Q&A: Kelsey Russell on Reading the News on TikTok

Two years ago, Kelsey Russell—then a twenty-two-year-old graduate student focused on education, sociology, and policy—came to a stark realization: she had no idea what was going on in the news. What she did know came to her in unfiltered torrents on social media, an experience that left her feeling emotionally off kilter, and no better able to hold a conversation about domestic politics or international affairs. This was, in some ways, surprising: Russell was a prolific content creator, as comfortable on social media as the most Gen Z of Gen Zers; she began making humorous lifestyle videos as an undergraduate in Boston, often about the experience of being Black in a notoriously white city. (Boston, Russell recently told an audience at a National Press Foundation conference, was “the antithesis of Atlanta,” where she grew up. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what I am doing with my Black self here.’”) Her audience clearly couldn’t get enough of her charming brand of wit and irreverence. By the time she moved to New York for grad school, at Columbia’s Teachers College, she had amassed a following in the tens of thousands.