More video is expected, while the people and money available to produce it stay the same

At some point over the past year, I stopped asking publishers why they wanted more short video. I was having much the same conversation every time, and there seemed no point in repeating it. The interesting question had become: how?

How do we make more when our video team is already busy? And what can we realistically try with the budget we have?

I’ve had dozens of these conversations. Every newsroom has its own situation, but I keep hearing versions of the same problem: more video is expected, while the people and money available to produce it stay the same. Sometimes there are fewer people. Hiring would help, of course. It just rarely seems to be an option.

That leaves publishers with a clear challenge: changing how they produce video. In practice, video needs to become something more people across the newsroom can create. A journalist learning to record a piece to camera, or an editor turning an article into a simple visual story. Neither happens just because someone says, “We should all be doing video now.” People need skills, useful tools and time to get comfortable with them. Otherwise, we’ve just added another job to someone’s already long list of responsibilities.

Even the term “short video” hides a lot. Fifteen seconds of footage, a reporter explaining a story for two minutes, an article repackaged with images and narration: we put them in the same category, although making them involves quite different work. I think this sometimes makes the discussion harder than it needs to be. A newsroom may struggle with one format and have everything it needs to try another.