Last summer, as my Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism colleagues and I watched the number of hits on the articles on our BINJ.News website plummet due to the destruction wrought on traditional search engines by their parent companies’ turn to so-called “AI search,” in which they started simply stealing content from websites like ours and presenting it as their own in order to keep people on their search sites rather than continuing to show them links to millions of sites like ours.
We then made a difficult decision to finally put significant effort into producing videos every week—most of which related to the news articles we produce—in hopes of increasing our “brand presence” and drawing more people to our website.
BINJ’s Chris Faraone had already been experimenting with video content on his own, but I joined him and as fall arrived we launched a weekly longform talk show “BINJ Live.” That got us more used to producing professional quality video content and working it into our weekly work schedule, but it did little to help build our audience. The breakthrough came this spring when we started cutting short videos out of every long show.
Then we started getting thousands of views on those shorts every week and started to see our circulation increase steadily.
Now in mid-summer, almost a year after we began, we have a robust video program that includes “BINJ Live” and a newer national biweekly show on the nonprofit journalism industry called “Indy News Publishers Speak.”
It’s a good deal of work to keep producing an entirely different type of content than traditional text journalism, but we’re glad we decided to do it. Because unlike many other things that we tried to increase our web traffic, regular video production is actually working. And that’s a rare win as we join fellow independent news publishers all over the country in trying to survive the ongoing collapse of the journalism industry.
Check out “BINJ Live” episodes here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1SdFfD8SP886Rj1YGn-o6cKMrau7MOxb
And “Indy News Publishers Speak” episodes here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1SdFfD8SP8-d42ddgaxiuh5OBD4Kw1oL
And enjoy our short videos on YouTube Shorts, Instagram, and several other social media platforms.
Jason Pramas is editor-in-chief of BINJ.News and executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
