The Newsroom of Tomorrow · No. 03Short Video Report
Questionnaire
Short-form video is an ideal format for reaching younger audiences
Short-form as a core distribution format for a regional publisher
What role does short-form video play in your newsroom today, and how has that changed in recent years?
Short-form video has evolved from a nice-to-have into a core distribution format at VOL.AT. Video content overall has been part of our DNA for around two decades, but short-form specifically is more recent ground - it took us two attempts over the past 10 years to get the workflows and portal implementation right. The shift has accelerated as our audience, especially younger readers, increasingly consumes content on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube rather than through classic article pages.
What are the main goals behind your short video strategy - reach, engagement, subscriptions, brand building, or something else?
Reach and audience-building come first, especially as a way to reach and make offers to younger audiences who don't come through our website directly. Engagement on our active social channels is a close second. Subscriptions (VOL.AT+) play a role too - there have been paid-content video initiatives in the past and more are planned, though these are separate from our day-to-day short-video output and depend above all on the content being high quality.
How is short-form video production organized in your newsroom? Who is involved in creating the videos? How many clips do you produce daily?
The raw material comes primarily from our "MoJos" (mobile journalists/reporters) who capture our unique, on-the-ground content, as well as from our social media team. The actual short-form videos are then edited, planned, and published by a colleague on our social media team, who owns the "Video Shorts" output end-to-end. We currently publish at least one to three short videos per day, but we want to significantly increase that output going forward, as we believe strongly in the format's potential.
What does your typical workflow for producing short videos look like, and what are the biggest operational challenges?
The focus is on hooking the reader immediately through the title placed directly on the cover image/thumbnail - that's what determines whether someone stops scrolling. Time pressure around breaking news is a factor, but less than one might expect, since short-form video isn't our primary breaking-news channel - for breaking news we still work more classically through top placements on our website and social. The biggest operational challenge is resourcing: producing genuinely platform-differentiated content (different hooks, thumbnails, headlines per platform) takes more time and people than we always have available.
The State of Short Video in Media · https://thenewsroomoftomorrow.com/p/mark-springer