Nieman Foundation at Harvard
You’ve probably noticed that when you open your favorite news site or app, there’s a lot more video.
When Wired had six reporters follow a robotaxi from autonomous car company Waymo around San Francisco, for example, associate director of social Evy Kwong took vertical smartphone videos and interspersed them through the piece. In a story about a a robot startup, Wired inserted a social video after the second paragraph. The video is anchored by the story’s reporter Will Knight, with a Godzilla poster and a lava lamp behind him.
Short vertical videos, a staple of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, are increasingly making their way on to news sites. The format is a hit with audiences — the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) reported earlier this year that 66% of respondents in its global survey watch short news videos every week — but more than two-thirds of that viewing still takes place on platforms, not publisher websites, RISJ found. Publishers are trying to change that.
“We’re looking for as many ways as possible to bring the videos that we’re making for TikTok and Instagram [on to] the site,” Indu Chandrasekhar, executive global director of audience development and analytics at Wired, told me.
News organizations are building vertical video carousels for their homepages and apps, embedding vertical videos in stories, and having their video journalists produce both horizontal and vertical content — as well as asking reporters to present their stories on camera. “Prestige TikToks,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel called them last month.
“The point is to future-proof our brand,” Liv Moloney, The Economist’s head of video, told me. “We want people to be able to consume our journalism how they want to consume our journalism.”
The Economist started making data- and graphics-led explainers for TikTok (and later Instagram Reels) in 2022. The videos — like “Who profits from culture wars?” and “Queen Elizabeth II’s record-breaking reign” — were designed to be accessible, not “intimidating,” and assumed little prior knowledge on the viewer’s part, Moloney said. They racked up more than 100 million views on TikTok in the first year. “We were like, it’s mad that this isn’t on our own platforms,” Moloney said. This past May, The Economist launched a vertical video carousel on its homepage and in its app.
The videos are anywhere between 90 seconds and 4 minutes long, and are a mix of interviews, reporter stand-ups, soundbites from Economist podcasts, and animated or visuals-heavy pieces. Subscribers to The Economist have to be logged in to their accounts to watch. They find what they want to watch by swiping up, similar to TikTok and Reels. The carousel houses 22 different videos and viewers find what they want to watch by swiping up, like on TikTok or Reels. Unlike on social media, though, there are no comments, likes, shares, or view counts.
“When subscribers come to our app, long-form video isn’t what they’re looking to consume,” Moloney said. “They weren’t coming [to] sit down for 30 minutes, need headphones, and turn their phone around to watch something in landscape. With the carousel, they’re actually spending longer than they would have with the long videos. They’re watching three or four in one go. They don’t want to just watch the same thing for that amount of time.”
The Economist still posts on videos on social media, too, and experiments with different types of content there. In October, the publication launched TikTok and Instagram accounts in Spanish, posting its videos with AI-generated translations and voiceovers; they’re experimenting with Mandarin, French, and German, too. But “we definitely now think of as subscriber-first and social-later,” Moloney said.
“What’s changed is the balance of what we produce,” Micah Gelman, the Post’s director of video, said. “Vertical video was rarer in 2015, but now it’s about half of what we produce in a given day.”
Like The Economist, the Post has a vertical video carousel on its homepage, which it debuted in 2023. Gelman and the Post’s homepage editors decide daily which videos will be featured.
“The audience expectation is that you won’t have to turn your phone sideways to watch video,” Gelman said. “People are experiencing everything in portrait mode.”
Videos in the Post’s vertical carousels don’t autoplay; the carousel includes 10 videos and is relatively far down on the homepage and app (the 13th section, by my count). Advertisements appear after every two videos. The Post sometimes adds video carousels to section homepages; I found one on the Business homepage and one on the Video homepage. It also embeds vertical video into story pages and live blogs. Election Day coverage, for instance, included vertical videos about concerned Kamala Harris supporters at Howard University and excited Trump supporters in Florida.
The video team identifies reporters they think will be comfortable in front of the camera, Gelman said, and coaches them through the production process.
“As we’ve seen that more influencer-type of video, I think more people come to it with a better understanding already of how they should be doing it,” Gelman said. “It’s about having people who are able to connect with the audience in a real, native way.”
Some of the Post’s video are similar to TV news segments. For a November 13 video about Trump and Biden’s first transition meeting after the election, politics video journalist Blair Guild reported from in front of the White House, wearing a red coat with her hair pulled back.
Others are more casual. In a one-minute how-to, climate solutions reporter Allyson Chiu walks viewers through how to recycle their mail instead of trashing it. Sitting and a table in a white button-down and smiling, she tells viewers which websites to visit to have their addresses removed from databases. “Now that you’ve done that,” she says, as a pile of mail is tossed from off camera in front of her, “let’s tackle the mail you’re still getting.”
Front and center on The New York Times’s homepage on November 14 was “Our reporters react to to Gaetz’s nomination.” The video featured Times reporter Maggie Haberman, wearing a gray suit jacket, with headphones dangling from one ear and her iPhone held up to the other. She breaks the news to Daily host Michael Barbaro. (“Wow!”) The video then cuts to congressional editor Julie Hirschfield Davis’s reaction.
Watching the video is like being on a tense, multi-person FaceTime call with your own camera turned off.
“That’s the power of this,” Times video director Solana Pyne told me. “[The phone] is a device that you use to call people and have a conversation. We’ve been experimenting with [recording] a roundtable for The Daily and recording it, and that was our first virtual roundtable. Technically, it was an experiment, but we decided to publish it because it was a powerful moment.”
The Times has been putting vertical videos on its homepage and in its app since last year, Pyne said. (The Times’ TikTok account launched in January 2023.) and videos can be placed pretty much anywhere, from live blogs to the homepage to section pages to article pages. The Times declined to share numbers about video views on its owned platforms, but said videos appear on the homepage and in the app almost daily.
“There’s a ton of enthusiasm for vertical and reporter videos, and for video overall,” Pyne said. “[The video team has been] participating in news meetings for years and years, but often the meetings were structured such that whatever we were doing in video was the last thing we would discuss. Now, video is often playing on the top stories of the day and we’re talking about video throughout the meeting. Masthead editors are asking for specific kinds of video or asking whether there’s video with a story.”
Today, nearly every horizontal video the Times makes also gets a vertical or square version for mobile. Rectangular video is still “very important,” Pyne said, but “if you’re on your phone, [vertical video is] more utilitarian,” Pyne said. “It’s a much better experience if you’re not turning your phone. And people don’t turn their phones.”
The Times is experimenting with different vertical video formats, from text-led stories on top of B-roll footage to reporter-anchored explainers from the field to journalists talking to the camera either on their phones or in a studio to clips from video episodes of The Daily.
In one video published last week in the Metro section, reporter Mihir Zaveri stands in front of the camera on a residential block of a New York City street discussing the city’s affordable housing shortage. The video is illustrated with photos, graphics, and maps that zoom into the exact locations mentioned in Zaveri’s voiceover. For a Thanksgiving feature, NYT Cooking asked celebrity chefs and cooking enthusiasts to share their favorite holiday recipes and memories, and several contributors filmed themselves talking in their own homes.
“Stylistically, we’re still evolving. Some of the guidelines that we give are not that dissimilar from television — wear a solid color, make sure your hair is brushed,” Pyne said. “We are trying to get people to feel comfortable. We lean into the fact that these are not broadcast personalities. These are reporters who often are working only in text and have an authentic expertise that comes through — even if their presentation is not immediately as conversational as an influencer’s.”
