For a long time, the staff of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism resisted making short videos to accompany our journalism. As writers and editors, we got into this trade to try to cover issues of the day in the public interest—as we often say—to be tribunes of the people, voices of the voiceless, and speak truth to power. All that good stuff. All the things that made journalism an indispensable part of American democracy… and still does, if you feel like taking giant shovels to the vast pile of pointless fluff on the Internet to attempt to dig out the vital stories that needed telling.
One of the major forces burying what’s left of the news industry is, yes, the push by social media giants toward the short video format. Forget text. Forget images. Forget even long-form videos—meaning videos longer than 30 seconds to three minutes. Since the rise of TikTok, short video has been where it’s at. It’s easy to watch on phones, wherever you are. It can, in turn, be produced while you go about your day from pretty much any phone with a camera and a decent connection. Such short content is super punchy and when it lands, it gives viewers a dopamine rush like no other.
Making viewers want to watch one short video after another after another for hours every day. Making viewers addicted to the endless excitement. Making the social media companies that all moved to video once TikTok pioneered it even more money than they were already raking in prior to that point. And making the almighty algorithms that those companies fine tune to keep people’s eyes on their screens all day everyday stop delivering audience share to every kind of media except short video.
As news organizations like ours watched our audiences evaporate like pools of water in some digital desert over the last couple of years, my BINJ colleagues and I finally felt compelled to start producing short videos of our own. Chris Faraone was first, learning the ropes over the last few months, and I finally jumped in a month ago.
And we’re trying to use it to maintain and build the audience for our journalism back up again by focusing on that journalism and telling viewers to go check out BINJ.News. And it’s working. Where we once got dozens of views on social media, we now get thousands. And more people are indeed coming to our website and checking out our work.
But we do worry. Because we’re interested in delving deep into the stories we cover to give readers 360-degree views of often complicated topics. We like the freedom being an independent outlet affords us to take the time to develop ideas and consider different perspectives in our coverage.
Yet the short video format tends to make us cover only one idea at a time. A mere fraction of an idea even. There’s little room for thoughtfulness, nuance, or subtlety. And there’s always the danger that our short videos could end up as vapid as most of what’s out there. Turning clicks into the only reason for producing content. Pivoting away from investigative reporting entirely in favor of the fashionable meme of the hour. And the public interest be damned. A road now well-travelled by all too many once-storied news publications.
We would like to avoid that fate— using short video judiciously, growing our audience as planned, and with it our budget. Which will allow us to keep producing hard-hitting journalism for the foreseeable future.
Let’s just see how it goes. We know our readers will always let us know if we’re using short video properly … or if short video (and its corporate masters) start using us.
This editor’s note was produced for BINJ.News, the independent weekly magazine of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service. If you want to see more reporting like this, sign up for BINJ’s free weekly newsletter at https://binj.news/signup/.
