Who Is Dylan Page.

Dylan Page is the UK creator who explains the news in short videos on TikTok, and in 2026 the Reuters Institute put him at the top of its UK entry in a list of youth-focused creators making news entertaining and easier to understand.

People asked about news creators by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism mentioned him most among those youth-focused creators in the UK. Its Digital News Report 2026 says: “In the UK, Dylan Page heads the list and has 19m followers on TikTok alone.”

For anyone who searches “dylan page” to find out who he is, that is the short version. For publishers and brand social teams, the more useful question is why a single creator now sits at the top of that list. It is the same shift we argued for when we said brands should post like a news source.

Who Dylan Page is

Page posts under the name News Daddy. When Deadline covered him in July 2024, it described him as known for short videos on news items that were spreading fast online, as well as bigger political stories, such as Joe Biden’s run for a second term.

Deadline also put him among “a new generation of social media stars who have become primary news sources for children around the world.” At that point it gave his following as more than 11 million. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 figure is 19 million on TikTok alone.

How the Reuters Institute found him

The Digital News Report is a study the Reuters Institute commissions to understand how news is being consumed in a range of countries. For 2026, YouGov ran it online for the Reuters Institute from the middle of January to the end of February 2026, across 48 markets.

As well as asking how people use news creators, the survey collected the names that people themselves consider to be news creators. The report then lists the most-mentioned names in each market. So “heads the list” means Page was the most-mentioned UK name in the report’s list of youth-focused creators who make news entertaining and easier to understand, not a ranking by followers or views.

The report defines news creators as individuals or groups who create and share content mainly on social and video networks “and have some impact on public debates”.

Why creators like him are growing

Across all 48 markets, the report says “more than a quarter of our global sample (27%) now get information each week from news creators”. In plain terms, more than one person in four across the survey gets information from a creator in a typical week.

The report gives the trade-off clearly. Creators “are widely seen as more entertaining and easier to understand than traditional news media”. At the same time, they are “often viewed as being less trustworthy and less impartial by the general population.”

Page sits in the part of the report about creators aimed at young people who make news entertaining and easier to follow. Its conclusions name him alongside France’s HugoDécrypte and the Czech creator Kovy as individuals “effectively building youth-based news brands”.

The NATO moment

In July 2024 NATO invited Page to its Washington Summit, which marked the alliance’s 75th anniversary. He announced it in a post on TikTok on 3 July, telling followers: “Ok, I don’t even really know how to say this, but you will never believe who has just contacted me… NATO.”

Deadline reported that the invitation came through a NATO programme called Protect the Future, which had already brought creators to its Brussels headquarters in 2022 and 2023. A NATO official told Deadline the alliance covered travel, accommodation and meals but did not pay a fee, and did not “exert any editorial control” over what creators made.

What publishers can learn from him

Our view is that Page is a working model of news packaging for short video, not a curiosity to dismiss. The lesson is not to copy his persona. It is to copy the system underneath it.

• One person, one recognisable voice, every day. Respondents named a person.
• The story is explained, not just reported. The Reuters Institute’s own finding is that creators win on being easier to understand.
• The format is native to the feed. A short video built for TikTok is a different product from a broadcast clip cut down to fit.
• Consistency builds a name. In our judgement, a name people remember comes from showing up daily, not from occasional posting.

If social is where people meet the news, the packaging has to be built for social first.

Where the model has limits

The Reuters Institute is careful here, and publishers should be too. It concludes that “creators are rarely replacing traditional news media outright”. They “tend to play a more supplementary role”, helping people interpret, explain or react to the news “rather than break stories themselves”.

That leaves room for newsrooms. They still do the reporting that creators explain. The opportunity is in the explaining, and in owning a recognisable face for it before someone else does.

The trust gap matters too, and it cuts both ways. The report says creators are often viewed as less trustworthy and less impartial by the general population. Yet young people say the youth-focused creators and brands it names, Page among them, are more trustworthy than traditional news media.

A publisher that adopts creator-style packaging should keep its own standards of accuracy and impartiality. Losing them in pursuit of reach would be a poor trade.

How NBK thinks about creator-led news

Our team’s experience spans social-first publishers including UNILAD, LADbible Group and SPORF. What we learned there is that a format like Page’s is not a lucky personality. It is a cadence, a packaging standard and a production rhythm that a team can run every day.

For a newsroom, that means deciding who the on-screen voices are, how fast a story goes from desk to vertical video, and how each piece is judged. Our publisher social work is built around exactly that operating rhythm.

Next step

If your newsroom is posting regularly but younger audiences still name a creator before they name you, NBK can help find the constraint in the system. Start with how news is packaged for the feed, then look at how often it ships.

For more on how video platforms are carrying news, see our piece on YouTube’s own news viewing figures.