Conversation · 06:00
Different goals require different strategies - one video can’t do everything
The state
of short video
in media
Thirteen newsroom interviews on video strategy, production and audience needs, with an analysis of European publishers’ video posts using Sotrender data.
212,904
Video posts analysed across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, covering videos of different lengths.
13
Newsroom interviews on video strategy, production and audience needs.
100
News brands selected based on the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2025, with analysis of their main social media accounts.
The data shows what publishers post and how audiences respond. The interviews explain how newsrooms make video decisions with the people, time and resources they have.
Read the full introductionWe invited heads of video and the people responsible for video and social at news organisations across Europe and beyond to tell us where they are today: what they produce, how their teams work, what they learned by experimenting, and which questions they still haven’t answered.
We started out writing about short-form. It became impossible - and not particularly useful - to talk about short-form in isolation, so the scope grew to cover short video inside the wider video ecosystem.
Thirteen newsroom interviews
Eight recorded conversations, each following its own path, and five written questionnaires answering the same ten questions.
Conversation · 05:00
Technology isn't the most important thing - storytelling is
Conversation · 06:00
We Reach Half of Slovakia Through Video
Conversation · 04:00
Journalists Need to Think More Like Creators
Conversation · 05:00
There are no golden solutions in video - only good experiments
Conversation · 06:00
We don't think about video in silos - it's one ecosystem
Conversation · 06:00
A Good Story Is No Longer Just Text
Conversation · 05:00
More video doesn’t always mean better results
Questionnaire · 04:00
Short-form video is an ideal format for reaching younger audiences
Questionnaire · 06:00
Video is table stakes for any news brand
Questionnaire · 06:00
Short-form doesn’t have to mean simplification
Questionnaire · 04:00
The key to success will be giving the audience a distinct reason to come to you
Questionnaire · 04:00
Short-form video has become a core storytelling format
Commentary
Meet audiences where they already are
Commentary
More video is expected, while the people and money available to produce it stay the same
Commentary
Video is eating social media. AI will feed it.
Data study
Choose the purpose of a video first, then decide how to judge it.
Explore by topic
Four reading paths through the interviews, organised around the challenges newsrooms face.
Scaling without breaking the newsroom
Four newsrooms hit the same wall - not enough people for the output they want - and answered it four different ways.
Is more video actually better?
Everyone can publish more than they used to. These four disagree about whether they should.
Making it pay
Reach is the solved part. These interviews are about the other one.
Where AI actually helps
Every newsroom here uses it somewhere. None of them agree on where the line is.
What
we heard
Six things that came back again and again - each one with the sentence that made the case.
There is no single video playbook
What works for one publisher, audience or platform may fail for another. Again and again, our interviewees stressed the importance of experimentation. The most successful teams test formats, study performance, learn from what works - and what doesn't - and continuously adapt rather than simply copying industry best practices.
There are no golden solutions in video - only good experiments.
Start with the goal, not the format
Different videos need to do different jobs. Reach, engagement, brand awareness, traffic, subscriptions and revenue are not interchangeable goals. A TikTok explainer, a YouTube interview and a video embedded in an article may all be called “video”, but they serve different purposes and need different strategies and measures of success. Several of our conversations came back to the same idea: one video cannot do everything. Understanding what a newsroom wants to achieve - and who it wants to reach - needs to come before decisions about platforms, formats or production.
Different goals require different strategies - one video can't do everything.
Video is becoming part of journalism, not just distribution
The strongest approaches consider the visual potential of a story, its audience and its destination from the beginning, rather than taking an existing article or television segment and simply cutting it into a vertical clip. This also means thinking about video as its own form of storytelling, rather than an additional output to be produced once the “real” journalism is finished.
A good story is no longer just text.
Journalists are becoming more visible
Faces, voices, expertise and personality increasingly matter alongside publisher brands. Recognisable journalists can help news organisations build familiarity and trust on platforms designed around individual creators. But becoming good on camera is a skill. It requires training, practice, confidence and time - not simply an instruction to journalists to “make more video”.
Journalists need to think more like creators.
Scaling video remains difficult
Good video takes time, people and specialist skills, while demand for content across formats and platforms continues to grow. Newsrooms are responding in different ways: building dedicated teams, creating templates and repeatable formats, centralising parts of production, changing workflows and experimenting with automation and AI. The goal is not necessarily to automate journalism, but to reduce repetitive production work and make video possible at greater volume.
More video doesn't always mean better results.
Reach is easier to achieve than revenue
Audiences are moving to platforms faster than publishers have figured out how to monetise them. Short-form video can generate enormous reach, particularly among younger audiences, but views do not automatically translate into traffic, subscriptions or sustainable revenue. Longer-form video may offer greater monetisation opportunities, but it also requires greater investment. Publishers are therefore trying to solve two problems at once: how to reach audiences in the places where they increasingly consume news, and how to turn that attention into lasting value for the business.
Short-form vertical video does not generate on-platform revenue the way long-form video does, so we have focused on using it as a vehicle for direct sponsorships.
The ten
questions
The five written questionnaires all answer the same ten questions, so they can be read against each other. The conversations follow their own path, so they aren’t in this comparison.
Short-form video has evolved from a nice-to-have into a core distribution format at VOL.AT.
Video is arguably the most important format in our newsroom right now.
VD was founded in 2020 as a video-based and social-first newsroom.
The role of short-form video at NZZ has changed drastically over the past 1.5 years.
Short-form video has become a core storytelling format rather than just supporting articles.
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.
We have three main goals: reach, brand awareness and direct sales.
At the moment, all the short-form content we produce is free and our main goal is reach: increasing brand awareness and generating engagement.
There are three goals of short-form videos at NZZ: Making NZZ content more accessible through shorter info-bites.
Our focus is on audience reach, engagement, brand building, traffic to our website, and creating monetization opportunities through platform and branded content.
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.
We are lucky to have a dedicated social video team that we built after merging our traditional video and social teams.
The VD editorial and production team is made up of 15 people: one social media manager, seven journalists and authors, a video department with three videomakers and two producers, and a graphic design team…
When it comes to vertical short-form video, we produce several different formats.
It is a collaborative process involving reporters, producers, editors, graphic designers.
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.
The workflow depends on the type of video.
The main challenge is balancing quality and creativity with speed of publication.
Short-form videos are typically produced by a single person, though they can always ask other team members for support.
Story selection → scripting → editing → quality check → publishing → analytics.
We work primarily with CapCut, alongside Adobe Premiere and OpusClip.
Editing software continues to be the most essential tool.
At the moment, we rely mainly on professional video editing tools, especially Adobe products and their AI-powered features, which allow us to improve audio quality, image quality and other technical aspects.
Premiere and After Effects remain our most essential tools.
We use Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Kling, and HeyGen for scripting, visuals, editing, subtitles, and translations.
A strong visual hook and a title placed directly on the cover image that grabs the reader's attention in an instant - before they even press play.
I strongly believe every video lives or dies in its first two seconds.
The opening of the video is the starting point for capturing the user’s attention.
It depends on the platform and how the video is presented.
A strong opening hook, concise storytelling, vertical format, captions, high visual quality, and content that is relevant and shareable.
YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are our primary social channels; Facebook has lost significant relevance for us.
Because we only have a handful of producers, we focus heavily on making vertical videos that can work across TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
Currently, when it comes to short-form content, we do not make major distinctions between platforms, except in terms of production volume and format adaptation.
As a relatively small video team, we have to prioritize clearly.
We customize content for each platform-Instagram for engagement, YouTube Shorts for discovery, and our website for deeper storytelling and audience retention.
Honestly, this is an area we don't yet track systematically - it's a gap we're aware of rather than a deliberate choice.
Views are our baseline metric since our benchmarks can quickly determine whether a video was successful.
As mentioned earlier, the most important metrics for us are those that involve an active user action.
While reach is our most important metric on social media (as it inherently reflects other factors like interaction and retention), watch time and audience retention are the most critical metrics on our own…
Views, Watch time, completion rate, audience retention, shares, engagement
Video content overall has been an important topic for us for around 20 years - not short-form specifically.
I am fortunate to work at an organization that understands the value of short form video.
In my opinion, it is difficult to imagine a sustainable monetization model for publishers based solely on short-form video, at least based on what we have observed so far.
Right now, video is primarily a tool for us to attract new audiences, and I believe that is working quite well.
Short-form video supports audience growth.
Short-form video is an ideal format for reaching younger audiences and making them offers.
Anyone who claims to know how the future will pan out with AI is lying!
I believe the future of short-form video in newsrooms will not be about producing more content, but about producing more meaningful content.
I believe AI will help us become significantly more efficient in video production.
AI will automate routine production tasks and enable faster, multilingual content creation, while human journalists will remain essential for editorial judgment, verification, and storytelling.
What the data tells us
Sotrender supplied the data. We analysed what publishers posted and how audiences responded on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube in May-July 2026.
212,904
100
346
15
Give video more weight on Facebook
Video earned more interactions per post than non-video posts for 75 of the 79 Facebook accounts with enough of both to compare. The median advantage was 3.31 times. Instagram showed a smaller advantage: video earned more interactions per post for 54 of 81 accounts, with a median advantage of 1.22 times.
Study how publishers get results
Brut and la Repubblica each recorded about 2.9 billion Instagram video views, from 1,297 and 2,803 video posts respectively. They show two different publishing patterns worth examining; the figures do not measure production efficiency.
Review the series as well as the hit
Among accounts publishing at least 100 videos, the median share of quarterly views from an account's most-viewed post was below 5% on every platform. Taken together, the top-post lists carried much more weight. Judge a series on data from all its episodes.
Choose the goal before the measure
For 53 of 87 eligible TikTok accounts, the most-shared post in the top-post list was not the most-viewed one. Views, shares, saves and comments favour different videos. Start with what the audience needs, then decide what success should look like.
Newsroom
Video Community
For people making video part of how media businesses grow. We don’t want the conversation to end with this publication.
Who it's for
People working in video production, social media, audience development, product, technology or business strategy. Freelancers and specialists working with publishers are welcome too.
What we talk about
Which formats and platforms to invest in, how to make money from video, how to organize production, and where new tools, AI and automation can help.
How it works
Free to join on 
Slack. A community host reviews each application before sending an invitation.