The New York Times columnist has done something few other writers have done: tame TikTok.

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Jamelle Bouie is far from a textbook social media star. The New York Times columnist -- who is also Slate's former chief political correspondent -- is a mainstay of legacy media's single largest platform. Bouie covers the deteriorating front of America's political system with astonishing speed and resonant clearheadedness, publishing thrice-a-week dispatches that are circulated across the paper's 11 million subscribers. And yet, when Bouie isn't writing columns, he can be found cultivating a different audience entirely -- one forged by wandering around his neighborhood in Charlottesville, Virginia, holding a front-facing camera under his chin.

Yes, in 2024, Bouie has become something of a TikTok influencer. He might not have the same mammoth reach of the biggest names on the platform -- nor does he possess the body-rolling flexibility of Charli D'Amelio -- but at 234,000 followers, he is still one of the very few old-school newspaper columnists who have managed to graft their names into the onyx algorithm of short-form video. It's especially impressive that, throughout this migration, Bouie hasn't compromised what has always interested him as a writer or a thinker. His TikToks all tend to be about politics and history -- innately considered and evenhanded -- usually in conversation with the echoes of national discourse. (In the past month, Bouie has covered the price of groceries, the Trump tariffs, and occasionally, the Blu-rays he's buying from the Criterion Collection.)

The media industry is in the midst of a reckoning about the limits of its authority, particularly in regard to that "liberal Joe Rogan" character who has failed to materialize. But Bouie has already been playing this game for some time. He has achieved considerable success as a journalist, and has effortlessly distilled his ability into a separate medium without losing anything in translation. At a moment where the business is scrambling to tap into seemingly unreachable audiences, Bouie has made it look easy. We talked about his approach to TikTok, the differing ideologies of those who engage with him on video and in print, and if he'd ever consider going on Joe Rogan himself. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What do you make of the whole "liberal Joe Rogan" discourse that's captivated Democratic circles since the election?

To the extent that I see some value in the proposition, I don't think that there literally ought to be a liberal Joe Rogan. I'm not sure that that's possible, first of all. I think the kind of empty-headed reactionary flattery that Joe Rogan does is not something that people who are left-leaning or liberal or liberal-curious are really going to respond to in the same way. But I do think that the Rogan model, perhaps of long, open-ended conversations with the performance of curiosity and a kind of broad open-mindedness, is attractive to a lot of people. There's probably a way to do that that isn't reactionary, right? You're not going to find a woke Joe Rogan, but you might be able to find people, outlets, or approaches that plug into a desire among the listening and viewing public to get information in a conversational way.

The mixture of that style with lifestyle stuff -- whether it's fitness, influencing, or nutrition -- is something that's possible to do from the left. But I think that there's not going to be a way to reverse engineer it. It's one of those things where if Democrats, for example, are interested in trying to replicate these content streams, they kind of just have to throw money at the wall and see what sticks. To use Rogan as an example, I don't think anyone could have predicted that -- let's be honest -- a C-tier comedian whose main claim to fame is a sitcom that's been off the air for 20 years and who was the host of a slop show from the 2000s would become maybe the most influential interviewer in the country.

Speaking of just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks, what moved you to get on TikTok and start making videos about politics?

Well, originally, I opened up a TikTok account just to see what all the hubbub was about, and the algorithm started serving me political content. And my thought after observing a lot of political content for a couple of months was, "Well, a lot of this is pretty bad. A lot of this is not good." And specifically, the immediate catalyst was that there was some history content creator who was just telling people things that weren't true, telling people lies and calling it history. I was just annoyed by it. And I thought to myself, "Let me give this a shot. Let me see how I fare doing this." I'm not sure if I think that the platform is good for society, but in the same way that it's valuable to have a place where people can get clean needles ... maybe this is an insane analogy.

I'm following it!

It might be helpful to try to do political and history content with an eye towards saying things that are true and verifiable, not sensationalist. That's where I've found my groove -- in not being sensationalist and not getting caught up in every outrage. I just try to produce takes that offer some sort of measured analysis of the world, and to offer as much context as I can provide for events. The New York Times obviously has a broad reach, but that reach is concentrated among a relatively narrow slice of people. It's affluent, college-educated, mostly white people above the age of 40, and that's all well and good, but I thought it was valuable to try to cultivate another kind of audience that maybe engages with my work in a different way. When I started doing it, I actually just read my columns or summarized a column. But I quickly realized that that's not particularly useful. It's more trivia that I work for the New York Times at this point on TikTok than it is people seeking me out as a guy who works at the New York Times. I'm not sure it's all that valuable for me to foreground that, and so I don't.

I've had a lot of conversations with journalists recently who are all kind of feeling some sort of angst or anxiety about their inability to reach people by writing articles. It's just hard to feel like you're being heard via the written word right now. It sounds like maybe you've experienced a little bit of that anxiety as well.

I wouldn't say that actually. I think the stuff I write for the Times has a large audience -- the universe of people who might be interested in learning about the country's history and putting it in present-day political context is pretty broad. But most of them are not going to read the New York Times. So it's like, how do I reach those people in particular? For me, writing is part of how I just process things, and so even if I were convinced that no one was reading it, I would still be writing. Everything I put on TikTok seems very polished, and it seems like it comes out easily. It's in part because I already did the hard thinking part when I wrote whatever I'm referencing or riffing off of -- so I still need to write. I also recognize that if I want to reach a bunch of twentysomethings, I'm not going to reach them at the New York Times.

You have a pretty active comment community on TikTok, and I'm sure you hear from your Times readers often. What are the main differences between your TikTok audience and your Times audience?

I do not read Times comments. I actually have no sense what's going on there. Times commenters are going to be disproportionately older, more affluent, and have a more set-in-stone way of thinking about politics and the world. And on TikTok, things are just so much more fluid. The big thing there is that there's much less political knowledge, and engaging with that is important. I also think, and this goes back to what I said earlier: The dominant mode for the distribution of news outside of print is this kind of hyperbolic, hysterical, emotion-grabbing approach.

There's a guy on TikTok who basically just reads news headlines. It's like, "Breaking news!" and he reads a headline, and he's very popular even though there's no original work happening there. He offers no additional context, nothing to help you understand what the significance of the story is -- none of that is there. And that's how a lot of people engage with news. I think it primes emotions of fear, anger, and rage, and that's just not helpful. It can just easily turn people off from wanting to engage with this stuff because it activates such an emotional response. When I think about the people who comment on my TikTok videos and watch them and the comments they make, I think that my kind of frankly somewhat boring affect, even when discussing things that are legitimately distressing, is a welcome thing. It's like, I'm not trying to scare you or make you feel any sort of way. I'm just going to tell you what is happening. And I think that's a novelty.

People do love you for your even-tempered persona on TikTok. How did you develop that?

I would say it's downstream of just sort of my childhood socialization of things I did as a kid and a student. I grew up as a church kid -- church every Sunday. There were lots of youth presentations. It was sort of the thing that we all had to do. I'm sure if I were to somehow go back and find the people who thought this was a good idea, they would explicitly say that they just wanted to give the younger congregants experience with that kind of public speaking and presentation, because that's an important skill to have.

But it was a thing I was doing when I was 8 years old. Then I did debate in high school and college. So I've always been doing public speaking and public presentations. It's how I got into writing. I got into writing by way of writing presentations. Yesterday, I hand-wrote a draft, and then I read that draft out loud. I still write for people to hear it in my voice spoken aloud. TikTok is just another version of that. I feel pretty comfortable doing it. I feel pretty comfortable presenting to people. It doesn't make me all that nervous to do.

Are the comments you get on those TikTok videos still super partisan? Or are the people responding to you a bit more unaligned or politically agnostic than the typical Times subscriber? I'm curious if the political orientation of the people watching your videos has surprised you at all.

So the typical video I make finds itself basically on what you might call sort of liberal-to-central-left TikTok. I say a typical video because it gets 20 or 30,000 views, and that's where it tops out. But anything that gets beyond that then starts drawing in lots of different kinds of people with different kinds of perspectives. Especially if the post itself isn't explicitly political -- it's about politics, but it's about other stuff, too. And then, yeah, you get people more conservative than me, but those people are not particularly political, or are apolitical. And I love it when those people comment because it actually provides an opportunity to really discuss further and to not just clarify my own thoughts. It's like, whenever I post about something history-related, we can talk more about this, more in depth, and that's very useful to me.

You mentioned marrying the political content with lifestyle content. Obviously, you're not posting about how to build shoulder mass on your TikTok, but the first time I ever saw you on video was when you were doing those cereal reviews, which was a different flavor of Jamelle than what I was used to. You talk about Marvel movies, you talk your Letterboxd account -- things like that. What has it been like showing people this other side of yourself?

Part of it's just like, this is stuff that I'm interested in. I like movies a lot. It's a major interest of mine. I spend too much of my money on buying physical media, so I want to talk about it. I don't always want to talk about politics or history. Let's talk about cooking, or whatever. It's important to me that people understand that I'm an actual human being who lives in a regular place and has more or less a regular life. I think because people know that I work for the New York Times, there's this image of what a New York Times columnist is. When I do a TikTok walking around my neighborhood, I would like people to see that I don't live in New York. I don't live in a gated community somewhere. I live in a pretty regular neighborhood, in a pretty regular place. Whatever fantasy you have about the kind of life that I live, I very much want to show you that's not the case. There is a little bit of strategic thinking there as well. I think people may be a little more willing to tune in and listen if it's like, "We're going to talk politics, and hey, here's a cookbook that I'm really into." "We're going to talk politics, and hey, I was doing dead-lifts at the gym today. Here's what that looked like." I think there is something to that. It is maybe intentionally cultivating a parasocial relationship with people. But if the goal here is to influence people, then yeah, I think it's worthwhile to do that kind of stuff.

That kind of reminds me of old-school mid-2000s political blogging in some ways.

Yes, I've been thinking about this as well. I'm a little too young to have really ridden the crest of that style of political blogging and immediately gotten a job out of it. I'm younger than [Matthew] Yglesias or Ezra [Klein] or Megan McArdle. I was at the tail end of that era. I didn't read those people, and the way those things were structured, where most posts were about something political but then there'd be a post about cooking or a post about gadgets or whatever, I think it's a formula that works, and I do think there's value in recapturing that tried-and-true formula. Just talk about normal stuff. In real life, if I meet someone for the first time, my opening line isn't like, "Hey, do you want to talk about the structure of the U.S. government?" No. It's like, "Did you see Conclave?"

Do you think this is something other journalists should think about? Like, taking advantage of more social media platforms, or just being more available or accessible? Do you think there's anything about your success on TikTok that could be instructive?

So to loop back around to your first question about the Democratic Joe Rogan, I do not think that if you're trying to promote yourself, you need to do a TikTok or Instagram. But I do think it's worth thinking about other audiences, and how you might meet them where they are in a way that feels natural to you. So if that is doing vertical video, then go ahead and do vertical video. If it's doing long-form conversations, do long-form conversations. And I think the thing that journalists -- and journalistic institutions -- get caught up in is this desire to have it be heavily produced, formal, and branded. And I'm not sure that that's all that's necessary. To go back to Joe Rogan, those are three- or four-hour podcasts, and a lot of it's bullshitting, and people love it. And I think audiences want at least something that appears to be authentic. They want something that seems like they're getting almost something personal. And if you're a journalist and you find that there's some other means you have that helps you get your work across and such, I think people should go for it. Give it a shot.

If you got the call, would you go on Joe Rogan?

I would. I wouldn't say no. I need to stipulate that I think Joe Rogan has bad thoughts. But if a guy wants to have a long conversation about what I think about things, then yeah, sure. That's a whole audience who isn't necessarily exposed to that kind of thing. I can't imagine Rogan asking me to expound on, I don't know, the 1890s. But should it happen, then yeah, I have a lot to talk about.