People ask me most weeks what the future holds and what will happen to publishing in the short, medium, and long term. It’s a fair question!
Short, medium and long term can mean almost anything, depending on who’s asking and what they’re bracing for, but there is one thing I can say with total confidence about all three horizons – change. Not any one specific change, just the certainty of it, arriving at different speeds, from different directions, whether we’ve built for it or not.
As a publisher of any size, you don’t get to opt out of adapting to your surroundings. Right now, two of those surroundings are doing more disrupting than anything else in the industry – video and AI. The impact of this disruption has been picked over extensively in recent months, so rather than retread that ground, it’s worth focusing on how we respond and what this journey actually looks like.
The job hasn’t changed; the format has
At its core, our job as a news organisation is unchanged: bring the news to the world, in whatever format the world is actually consuming it in. For years, when it came to video, this meant that video was consumed with a traditional video player which was embedded on the page.
As my organisation has moved to put video at the very centre of our newsrooms, it became clear that we needed to build ourselves a video tool that can meet some very specific needs. We’ve called our new video tool Lens, within a wider platform called Launchpad which brings all of the editorial tools and publishing processes together. The interesting part of this project wasn’t just the technology, but the questions we made ourselves answer first: What do we actually want? How do we serve our users better? How do we build something that makes a journalist’s life easier, not harder, while making the experience of consuming news genuinely better on the other end?
It started with the ‘what’:
- A single, one-stop shop for all video that’s easy to navigate
- Video that’s easy to upload, search, edit and distribute – from anywhere
- Better meeting the audience demand to consume news and video beyond the traditional formats, embracing short form and vertical video
None of that is radical on paper. What’s more stark is how far the traditional newsroom / publisher’s video workflow sits from all three. Here’s how we aimed to meet these new demands and serve both newsrooms and audiences, and what I suggest other publishers consider as they move to make the most of the huge appetite for video. With these formats in mind, publishers need to implement an easy and stable framework and workflow.
Consolidate your tools (and remember, it’s not really about the tools)
Most newsrooms have seen an explosion of tools, dashboards and libraries to serve their growing video offering, including a whole host of AI-powered video editing options. On its face, that’s not a bad thing, and AI video editing has essentially democratised video publishing overnight. But if we’re going to put video at the centre of the newsroom, we can’t force journalists rushing to get a good story out there to open up ten different programmes.
Instead, we need tools that serve our journalists and content creators better and make it easier for them to give our viewers what they want.
It’s been my mission to pull all of this together and make sure that people can record, upload, edit and distribute, all from one place rather than needing to remember what tool to open next.
Empower video publishing from anywhere – not just the newsroom
Social platforms come under a lot of fair criticism in the publishing industry, but they have made one thing brutally clear: people can be reached and engaged with content anywhere, instantly, without friction. Publishing needs to do the same. So, we’re building around vertical video formats, and around a platform that lets a journalist film and upload from the field not wait until they’re back at a desk with a keyboard, mouse and wifi connection to get the footage into the newsroom.
Meet people where they are with vertical video
While most publishers are well onboard the video train, not everyone has fully embraced the importance of vertical video. Over the next twelve months, I see more and more publishers adopting vertical video – a format where so much of our audience spends so much time in their daily lives. This will require many of us to build dedicated vertical video spaces and experiences into our sites and apps, rather than treating it as an afterthought bolted onto existing sites or app formats.
For a publisher, that’s not just a format shift. It’s a chance to own the space users already want to be in, but filling it with trusted sources and expertly trained journalists.
These are a few of the questions you might ask yourself as you prioritise video in your everyday working:
- What do I need to produce the new video formats?
- How will we distribute and display the videos?
- How can we engage the users?
- Where will our users consume them?
- How will the business monetise them?
- How does vertical video fit into our future?
- How can AI tools help your team achieve this?
As we all look into the future, we need to keep building around the honest answers rather than the convenient ones. At Reach, we pride ourselves on being “where people live” and this year, a big part of this has been challenging ourselves to confront where people definitely are – and aren’t – as they navigate all of the information and content they come across every day.
Short, medium, long term: none of us can say exactly what those horizons hold. But the publishers who come out the other side won’t be the ones who guessed correctly. They’ll be the ones who kept asking the question and built something while they waited for the answer.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
