There are no golden solutions in video - only good experiments

I work for Time SA, which is part of ZPR Media Group. Our portfolio includes radio stations, newspapers, magazines, digital brands, book publishing, events and conferences, so video touches almost every part of the organisation.

Our team supports brands such as Radio Eska, Eska ROCK, Super Express, Murator, and many others. We produce virtually every type of content - from podcasts, videocasts and livestreams to YouTube shows, vertical video, branded content and event coverage.

Video is no longer a separate product. It's part of nearly every editorial and commercial activity we run. At the same time, video production isn't limited to one department.

Journalists and social media teams also create video, while our central audio-video team provides production standards, studio support, technical expertise and coordination across the organisation. Altogether, the central ecosystem involves more than 60 people, including producers, editors, operators, technicians and freelancers.

Every day starts with production planning. We operate three dedicated video studios alongside our radio studios, and on a typical day we might have nine studio productions scheduled, plus field productions happening simultaneously.

Once those productions are planned, the entire workflow follows: producers prepare recordings, operators film them, editors create different versions, distribution teams publish them, and journalists reuse both the audio and video across multiple platforms.

One important principle is that many of our operators are also editors. The person filming often edits the final piece as well, which makes the process faster and more efficient.

I actually prefer the term vertical video rather than "shorts," because our content isn't produced only for YouTube Shorts. The same content may end up on TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook or YouTube Shorts.

Some vertical videos are created specifically for social media. Others come from our radio studios, showing behind-the-scenes moments or promoting broadcasts. We also dedicate studio time every day for editorial teams to record short, news-focused videos designed specifically for social distribution.

And, of course, every long-form production becomes a source of additional content. Podcasts, interviews and studio shows are regularly repurposed into multiple shorter clips that can both promote the original programme and stand on their own.

You have to standardise certain things, but you can never standardise everything. Every publisher would like one perfect workflow, one perfect strategy and one perfect set of rules.

In reality, that's impossible. Platforms change constantly. Audience expectations change. Algorithms change. A strategy that performs well today may become ineffective six months later.

That's why I don't believe in searching for one universal model. What matters is building an organisation that can experiment continuously. Different brands need different approaches, and having multiple strategies running at the same time actually gives you better insight into what's working.

I would say - absolutely. We're often looking for golden solutions that simply don't exist. There are only good ideas worth testing.

Looking at what others are doing is valuable, but copying another publisher rarely works because every organisation has different audiences, different brands and different business goals.

The important thing is building enough flexibility to test different approaches, compare results and adapt quickly when platforms evolve.