“Today’s metrics are tomorrow’s punchlines, and yesterday’s pivot is today’s clumsy tumble,” Vice’s union tweeted on August 26, following the company’s elimination of 17 staffers across Vice and Refinery 29.

The layoffs were preceded, just a month earlier, by an announcement from Vice that it would “reduce the number of old-fashioned text articles on Vice.com, Refinery29 and another Vice-owned site, i-D, by 40 to 50 percent,” while increasing videos and visual stories on Instagram and YouTube “by the same amount.”

It all feels very five years ago. As we’ve documented, starting around 2016, Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg began pushing the notion that news video on Facebook was publishers’ bright future, a “new golden age.”

It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, massively overestimating the amount of time that users spent consuming video ads. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with those advertisers, paying them $40 million (while admitting no wrongdoing). But it was too late for the publishers who’d already pivoted to Facebook video and then either made big cuts or shut down completely when it turned out people weren’t actually watching.

And now we have more proof that they weren’t watching, in the form of a tidbit from The Wall Street Journal’s big ongoing investigation into a trove of internal Facebook documents. In a story published Wednesday, Keach Heagy and Jeff Horwitz detailed how users’ engagement with Facebook started falling in 2017. Turns out that video did not slow the decline, but may actually have contributed to it:

Comments, likes and reshares declined through 2017, while “original broadcast” posts — the paragraph and photo a person might post when a dog dies — continued a yearslong decline that no intervention seemed able to stop, according to the internal memos. The fear was that eventually users might stop using Facebook altogether.

One data scientist said in a 2020 memo that Facebook teams studied the issue and “never really figured out why metrics declined.” The team members ultimately concluded that the prevalence of video and other professionally produced content, rather than organic posts from individuals, was likely part of the problem.

Facebook’s solution? Ratchet up the anger! It worked where all that Facebook Live did not.

There is one way that the video pivots and layoffs of 2021 are different from the earlier round: Executives don’t mention Facebook anymore.

“Across our news brands we see consistent global growth on text articles as a way to reach and grow new audiences,” Cory Haik, Vice’s chief digital officer, wrote in that layoff memo last month. “Alternatively, our digital entertainment brands like NOISEY and MUNCHIES have had a remarkable increase in views and engagement through our visual platforms (YouTube, Instagram) but a precipitous decline in text consumption over the last few years, roughly 75 percent.”

The iPhone 12 represents Apple’s first major foray into 5G cellular technologies. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg was on hand during the event to announce the nationwide launch of the carrier’s sub-6 5G network. Apple says it has designed the iPhone 12 lineup to achieve ideal network performance while balancing battery life. A “smart data mode” uses LTE when your current activity doesn’t demand 5G speeds. Apple says it has tested 5G performance with 100 carriers across 30 countries to ensure a smooth launch.

“So far, we’ve seen amazing real-world speeds, along with improved call quality, battery life, and coverage around the world,” Apple’s marketing says. “This is 5G, iPhone style.”

Apple isn’t the first company to release a 5G phone, of course, but market uptake has been relatively slow. It’s growing, though: In January, 3% of phones sold in the U.S. had 5G; by August, that was up to 14%.

But nothing will do more to increase that share than a 5G iPhone; about half of the phones in Americans’ pockets have Apple logos on the back. 5G devices are projected to make up about 48% of phones in North America by 2025, more than Europe (34%) or worldwide (20%).

What does 5G do? It makes data a lot faster. What does that do for journalism? Last year, I sketched out some of the possibilities.

Things that are possible but suboptimal on middling connections now — say, livestreamed video — should become much more reliable.

Things that are on the edge of possibility now — like decent-quality AR and VR — should become much more mainstream.

And there can just be…more, of everything. An AR experience that today places an object into 3D space might be able to handle an entire roomful of objects tomorrow. One live video stream going to a device might become three or four simultaneous streams, with users able to move seamlessly between them without a stutter or glitch and with less compression required all around.

On the flip side, things that have justified primarily because they improve end-user performance will become less appealing over time. Publishers have adopted Google’s AMP at a large scale because it offers much faster speeds for users on mobile.1 Don’t misinterpret this as blasphemy against the webperf gods — but as data gets faster, the reasons to accept the tradeoff of AMP’s flaws get weaker. (Just as things like web fonts, background video, and larger images are all more acceptable today than they were a decade ago.)

It’s all interesting stuff! But let’s be realistic: The apps that benefit most from 5G won’t be the ones from news publishers. They’ll be the other apps competing for our audiences’ attention: games, entertainment, and other new data-heavy ideas that haven’t been thought of yet.

Think about it: News stories are indeed better on today’s faster 4G connections than they were on 3G a few years ago. But Netflix is a lot better on 4G than on 3G. Call of Duty is a lot better on 4G than on 3G. Houseparty is a lot better on 4G than on 3G. News — text-based news especially, but video news too — just isn’t as well-positioned to take advantage of greater bandwidth as the other icons on our home screens.

1. And, let’s be honest, because Google put its thumb on the scale.

Wilson is an artist’s muse and models for other artists. Because modeling requires being in a room with other people, his bookings and other freelance gigs were cancelled when New York City went into lockdown in March. In trying to make the best of his new normal, we see Wilson practicing yoga, talking to friends, and trying to figure out how to file for unemployment.

Because of social distancing measures, Wilson shot all of those scenes himself on a smartphone.

Quarantine Diaries is a collaboration between the Times metro desk and the video team. The goal is to tell stories about how everyday New Yorkers are dealing with isolation, illness, and the big life events that were unavoidable (like giving birth during a pandemic).

“We weren’t able to go into their apartments, so we had to fall back on this set of production techniques that we’ve developed over the years to help us capture these stories in an intimate and complete way, despite the restrictions,” series producer Alexandra Eaton said. “That involves a lot of Google Hangout interviews. It involves working with the character to get them to shoot stuff on their iPhone, so basically they become the B-roll shooter.”

Eaton said the team found Wilson by attending a Zoom meeting for tenants who wanted to learn to organize rent strikes. Metro desk reporter Corina Knoll followed up with several attendees, and Wilson’s story piqued her interest.

“It was interesting to see how remote organizing is working right now, and a great opportunity for us to see what people look like, how they speak, see if they would make good subjects,” Eaton said. “It was kind of like a dream casting session, in a way.”

While the project is new for the Times’ video team, Eaton said that they had inadvertently been prepared for this. Even though they have been giving their characters a shot list of videos, The Times has been doing virtual interviews through FaceTime for the last two years for its Diary of a Song series that takes a deep dive into popular music. Eaton said they opted for FaceTime because it was difficult to set up in-person interviews with celebrities with active travel schedules.

Eaton said that while the technical aspects of producing the series haven’t changed much, she can’t join in on the FaceTime interviews. Previously she would be in the same room as the host Joe Coscarelli to make sure they got everything they needed, but now everyone’s social distancing, and there’s no aesthetically pleasing way to edit out a third person from a group FaceTime.

“The [other] thing that I can’t do now is sit in an edit room with the editor,” Eaton said. “We’re very fortunate to have an amazing editor, Will Lloyd, on that series. We do a lot of mind sharing already. But the little tiny details of moving things around? That finessing can’t happen. A positive thing is that you really learn to trust your coworkers and their instincts and and know that you’re going to do a great job.”

Video producer Barbara Marcolini works on the visual investigations team. Because she usually produces breaking news videos or investigations in war zones where a shooter can’t be there to film, she’s accustomed to getting creative with whatever or whoever is available. Sometimes, that means coaching a source via video chat on how to get the images she’s looking for.

“It’s great that other journalists are also learning and exploring this, because I feel the power of having someone with a camera in their hands. They can film what they’re seeing and you can see the story through that character’s eyes,” Marcolini said. “It can bring much more power to the story. The intimacy that you can build with your character when you’re doing a FaceTime interview instead of having a big camera crew in their living room is great. It gives you the ability [to see] what’s happening through your character’s eyes, through what they are experiencing. You’re taking a journey with them.”

In one video about how Italy’s doctors were handling the coronavirus, all of the interviews were from recorded video calls. Doctors Enrico Storti and Francesca Mangiatordi contributed some photos and B-roll from inside their hospitals. Both were credited at the end of the video.

“I like the roughness of the image. I like the style of it,” Marcolini said. “You want it to look like the person was shooting with their phone because that was what they were doing — we don’t want to manipulate in a way to make it look better. We treat that footage as evidence for investigations, for example. Or in a breaking news situation, like a hurricane, the person who’s shooting might be anxious or nervous because they’re going through a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You want the shakiness and the granularity of the image.”

Zainab Khan, the Times’ audience strategy editor for video, said newsroom video views went up 140 percent in March. She said that there’s been a particular influx of new viewers on the Times’s YouTube channel. In an effort to retain those viewers after the pandemic, video producers introduce themselves in the comments section and give some information about the reporting process. Then, for the next day or two, they answer viewer questions.

Things like using Zoom call interviews or answering viewer questions might seem small, but they help create more intimacy with the viewers during such a fraught time.

“When we’re forced to replicate how people are communicating in their daily lives in our reporting, there’s a barrier that’s no longer there,” Khan said. “[Normally] there’s the reporter-to-subject relationship, but then there’s also the reporter, subject, and audience relationship. Now everyone is experiencing things in a very similar way. We speak of the fourth wall, and I don’t think there is a new wall because the way that I’m watching a video is the same way I’m calling my mom.”

In his memo, chairman David Bradley noted three areas where The Atlantic is having trouble: Advertising, events, and video. Advertising is no surprise — it’s been decimated for nearly everyone, with losses accelerating in the last couple months — but events and video were once seen as potential bright spots for digital publishers — ways to diversify their revenue and reach new audiences. If there was any doubt, it’s now gone: Video and events will not save us.

First up, video: We “are closing our video department,” Bradley wrote. A couple years ago, publishers raced to bulk up their video departments, guided in part by Facebook’s now-extremely-suspect-seeming guidance that it was really, actually what news consumers wanted. It turns out they do not. The 11 members of The Atlantic’s video team accounted for half of the layoffs on the editorial side, per The Washington Post.

It’s been a hard day @theatlantic. I’m among the dozens who lost our jobs. I have loved working on stories about immigration and the border here with the smartest people I could hope to call colleagues. Here’s a few highlights from our (now-employable!) video team. (thread)

— Jeremy Raff (@JeremyRaff) May 21, 2020

wow, golden oldie, the time @Facebook lied about its numbers and got half the journalism industry to run off a cliff and everyone lost their job. https://t.co/L8BYfttBcP

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 22, 2020

But The Atlantic’s events business, AtlanticLIVE, was hardest hit. From Bradley’s memo:

In one week in March, maybe two, the ground fell out from under live events — live anything worldwide. Of necessity, our events work went virtual. It turns out, there is substantial room for original creation in a zoom-led frame on life; to begin, we are able to bring our writers into conversation with our readers — at a scale no hotel ballroom can match. Even so, all of us hope for that day when we can create, or contribute to, signature events such as The Atlantic Festival and the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Virtual events can’t bring in nearly as much money as live ones. For one thing, people aren’t that inclined to pay for something if they’re just going to be sitting at their desks. (On Thursday, we ran a post about how the Center for Cooperative Media brought its annual summit online; while “attendees” jumped, most of those people weren’t paying — one of the first things the Center did was make tickets free.)

As my colleague Joshua Benton wrote in March, even as parts of the U.S. economy start to reopen, conferences will be among the last things to come back — if they do at all:

The time gap in the conference business will be longer than in a lot of other areas. And events revenues will dry up for a longer period of time than, say, advertising revenue.

Most conferences are, like Wall Street Journal print subscriptions, ultimately paid for by companies who determine the information gained by their employees will be worth the cost. And who knows how businesses will look at a $600 registration fee, round-trip flights, and four nights at the DoubleTree after all this?

And all the people who plan and work on those conferences — many of them will either lose their jobs or be reassigned to different work. After coronavirus, how many of them will want to or be able to return to their old work, right away or at all? How much muscle memory will be lost as predictable planning processes suddenly go fractal all across the calendar?

Since Josh wrote that in March, we’ve learned more about how COVID-19 spreads, and poorly ventilated indoor spaces packed with people talking are going to be a must-avoid long after beaches and restaurants have reopened. (The Online News Association announced Thursday, by the way, that its annual conference this October will be fully virtual.)

@AtlanticLIVE gave me my start in professional journalism and these are some really top-notch human beings and journalists.

— Scott Nover (@ScottNover) May 21, 2020

Along with 67 incredible people at @TheAtlantic, I’ve been notified today that my job @AtlanticLIVE is being eliminated. It’s been the honor of a lifetime to work for this incredible publication and with the most talented and generous group of people I’ve ever met. (1/

— Jacqueline (@jacqlandry_) May 21, 2020

I am thinking of everyone at @TheAtlantic today, but especially @AtlanticLIVE. It’s one of the most generous, hardworking, and exceptional events teams out there. The work they do is crucial. My time there made me the event professional I am today, and I am so thankful for that.

— Sherene Joseph (@ShereneJoseph) May 21, 2020

For two years, I have gotten to produce journalism about criminal justice reform, economic inequality, and more at events across the country. I am proudest of my work when it has helped someone tell their story and be heard. Thank you @robhendin, @MaryMSuh & all of @AtlanticLIVE.

— Stefanie Fernández (@matervamami) May 21, 2020

That advertiser lawsuit has now been settled: The Hollywood Reporter reported Monday that Facebook agreed to pay the advertisers $40 million, though the company maintains it did nothing wrong.

Twitter, on the other hand, is, uh, less convinced of Facebook’s innocence in the matter — and many pointed out that while the advertisers are getting a (small, in Facebook terms) settlement, the journalists laid off in all that video-pivoting are getting nothing.

The journalists around the world that I know personally who pivoted to video and subsequently lost their jobs once the traffic hose turned off will not only never see a penny of this, they cannot get back the years they lost of their careers churning content for nothing. https://t.co/UpBlPWhFpf

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) October 8, 2019

The videos that were going viral at peak Facebook video overload weren’t even videos that would make sense in someone’s reel. They were glorified powerpoint-esque montages made by staffers learning as they went. They make no sense outside the platform. What a god damn waste.

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) October 8, 2019

How much is going to everyone who got fired because of “pivoting to video" https://t.co/coLblKlY5H

— Jane Coaston (@cjane87) October 7, 2019

None of it will go to the journalists who were canned or forced to “pivot to video” based on facebook’s BS. https://t.co/mqcZqbfoRh

— Robert Weintraub (@robwein) October 8, 2019

This is egregious. Facebook broke the journalism industry with this misstatement. A lot of good people lost their jobs as a result. https://t.co/fuPabyWuy5

— Ernie Smith (@ShortFormErnie) October 8, 2019

Put ir directly into a trust to be transparently disbursed to small newsrooms annually. And this should be a first rather than a one-time payment. With more and better journalism, the @Facebook-fueled Myanmar genocide may never have been allowed to happen, for example https://t.co/ZfNXcyQs7N

— Brooke Binkowski (@brooklynmarie) October 8, 2019

Separately, Facebook announced Tuesday that it’s giving $300,000 to European news publishers to help them experiment with video.

“Introducing Aftershot, the only app that helps a bunch of assholes figure out when to talk about gun reform.”

These feel like lines pulled from SNL commercial parodies. But they’re actually from The New York Times — more specifically, from the Times’ year-old Opinion Video department, which is aiming to produce videos that appeal to a YouTube-native audience and feel very different from…well, let’s say “stodgy stereotypical newspaper video.” You might be surprised by the swearing. And the Facebook snark. And the variety of video styles. And that these are things your non-news-junkie friends might actually want to watch.

While I found the satirical pieces the most strikingly different from what I’d expect from the Times, they’re only a small part of what the Opinion Video department is putting out. It also includes: investigations into crazy sexism in Chinese tech job hiring (that one was done in partnership with Human Rights Watch as well as an independently hired Chinese social media expert to scrape the social web); rapper/activist Meek Mill on prisoners’ rights; and a major three-part series on Russian disinformation (which BBC World has licensed).

The new opinion videos are “enabling us to get voices we would otherwise never be able to get on our platform,” James Bennet, editorial page editor at The New York Times, said in a talk this week at the Shorenstein Center. The videos are also attracting new audiences at a moment when the Times is extremely focused on subscriber growth; for now, Opinion Video is almost entirely focused on YouTube, even though everything is also posted on The New York Times’ website.

“We’re not really taking on these battles over on-site promotion and homepage placement and all those things,” said Adam Ellick, the Times’ director and executive producer of opinion video. “Our priority is YouTube.”

I recently talked to Ellick and to Times senior video editor Taige Jensen about their first year making videos aimed at what Ellick describes as “a new generation of video viewers who have come to expect voice and attitude.” Our conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

It’s worth a try, according to a report released by Shorenstein and Northeastern this week. The authors suggest that local TV stations “remix” their hard news offerings by borrowing tactics from digital-native publications — incorporating animation and historical video, for instance. A limited test of these remixed videos suggested that the technique was effective — although it doesn’t fix the problem that TV ownership is declining.

People over 50 are much more likely to watch local TV news than younger people. Pew reported last year that 28 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they “often” get news from local TV; just 18 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said the same thing.

Mike Beaudet, John Wihbey, and their team at Northeastern watched hundreds of hours of local TV news and found that “most local television news operations are sticking to a traditional format, a recipe that’s been around for decades. News, weather, sports, and a dash of anchor happy talk. Wash, rinse, repeat.” Videos from sites like Vox, NowThis, Snapchat, and Vice, meanwhile, “are eclectic and often have a more authentic feel and avoid the traditional storytelling approach of local TV news.”

The researchers partnered with six local TV stations across the country to create and test remixed versions of their stories, then had an audience research firm survey about 100 people in each of the six markets on their feelings about the traditional versus remixed videos.

“The results show there are opportunities for expanding the audience both on air and online if television stations are willing to more closely focus in on the key component of all good journalism: storytelling,” the authors write. “While remixing the stories did not resonate every time, we did see positive results on the group of hard news stories where we altered the storytelling approach. This experimentation included everything from incorporating animation and sound elements to providing more context and background on stories.”

One remixed hard news story that worked was about Billy Graham’s funeral in Charlotte:

The original Billy Graham funeral story is one minute and 37 seconds long while the remix is two-minutes and 26 seconds long. This additional time allowed us to bring in more context about Graham’s life and death. While the original story focused on the funeral itself and exclusively featured video from the service, our remix combined the funeral video and archival footage, including historical interviews with Graham, to spotlight some notable times throughout his life and career.

To help illustrate the impact of Graham’s life over many decades and give the story an edgier feel, we used a 50-second animated timeline with sound elements to highlight five significant periods for Graham, including controversial remarks he made in 1993 about AIDS being a “punishment” for homosexuality, something he apologized for a few weeks later.

Audiences were significantly more likely to describe the remixed hard news videos as interesting and visually appealing. Remixing did not seem to make a difference, meanwhile, with soft news stories (“dogs loose on freeway,” “injured goose”).

The researchers also surveyed audiences on what is important to them in local news, and found — perhaps counterintuitively — that respondents preferred depth over “short, quickly digestible content…asked to describe what their ideal local news program would look like, respondents fairly consistently chose depth over efficiency.”

You can read the full report here, and see more examples of the original and remixed videos here.

Well, it turns out, plenty of Vox.com video lovers would. When you sign up for a Vox Video Lab membership, you can choose between two different price levels. For $4.99 per month, you get the “DVD extras” of Vox videos: behind-the-scenes content, videos explaining Vox’s process, recommendations for non-Vox videos, and a monthly live Q&A with a producer. For $9.99 a month, you get all that plus…access to a quarterly Google Hangout where they can give Vox more advice about its membership program.

One of the perks of our youtube membership program is monthly recommendations for great non-vox videos to watch. This month, I list 5 of my recent favorites, with a special appearance from a magical dog. To sign up: https://t.co/w8l0DITbuP pic.twitter.com/Hj0Kkm36OY

— Joss Fong (@JossFong) January 8, 2019

Last week, Vox Video Lab held its first such meeting. It included Vox fans from nine different countries. “I was floored,” said Blair Hickman, Vox.com’s director of audience. The time that worked best for a global digital audience, it turned out, was 5 p.m. eastern. “One guy was like, I’m kind of tired. I’ve had a long day at work in Switzerland,” Hickman recalled. (In Switzerland, it was 11 p.m.) Still, they showed up. “They were asking questions like, ‘Can we have Slack rooms so we can better prepare for these meetings? How can we coordinate in helping you reach your goals outside of these quarterly meetings?'”

These sweet meeting lovers are one sign that, roughly six weeks in, Vox.com’s video membership program might be working. (Of course, Vox would not tell me how many paying members it has, in either the $4.99 or $9.99 tier.) Vox Video Lab launched right before Christmas, with “YouTube innovation funding” from the Google News Initiative. (If “taking money from Google to help us get money from our audience on YouTube” doesn’t sum up the news industry’s conflicted relationship with big platforms, well, I’m not sure what does.) It’s the first time that any Vox Media property has solicited financial support from its audience, and is obviously different from other membership programs that have launched in that it is focused on video and YouTube rather than text. (YouTube first introduced channel memberships broadly last summer; the company takes 30 percent of subscription fees after local sales tax is deducted, so Vox gets 70 percent of the revenue from each membership.)

You'll probably get the best sense of those perks in this launch video we made: https://t.co/uYmO1Wp0aS
We'll constantly be iterating to make sure you're getting the best bang for your buck, but I'd say most of the perks will be fun behind the scenes "making of" type stuff.

— Estelle Caswell (@estellecaswell) December 20, 2018

Before launching the Video Lab, Vox.com surveyed readers on what they wanted from a membership program. They found two buckets of people willing to pay: One group was the “Vox superfans,” the other was a group that loves Vox’s video style and is interested in making videos themselves. They also heard a consistent message, said Vox.com head of video Joe Posner: “‘We just want to support what you do, we don’t really care what we get.’ It was cool to know that a major motivator, at least as far as we can tell from this survey, is that people do just want to support us.” It also meant that the logical step for the premium $9.99 tier was simply more access to Vox video creators (though Vox does also plan to roll out more perks for the $9.99 subscribers over the next few months).

.@cleoabram just made this super interesting video for Vox about triangles and video games. Yes, triangles: pic.twitter.com/FZC5xPGkv0

To learn about the editing— and why storytelling babies often end up on the cutting room floor – join the Vox Video Lab! https://t.co/L7uZKh5fFC https://t.co/LlN6VYl4bF

— Blair Hickman (@amandablair) January 15, 2019

“I’m sure everybody in the industry would [agree] that YouTube can be a messy, nasty place,” Hickman said. “The membership is just this delightful two-way conversation, with people who are really there to support Vox.” Vox.com’s wording around the membership program has stressed the financial support that it needs; for instance:

The foundation of all we’ve done is our free, ad-supported short-form video program. But few of the highest-quality free videos are supported by advertising alone. We all adore the free segments of Last Week Tonight on YouTube — and they probably will stay free as long as people keep paying for HBO. Dozens of our favorite independent creators give their fans the chance to support their work through Patreon. So, today, we’re asking fans of Vox video to help us continue to expand our ambitions by joining the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

YouTube’s membership program itself is in early phases, and Vox has been in touch with YouTube reps to talk about ways of improving it. For instance, YouTube provides Vox with very little information on who its paying members are. It “reflects our audience in general on YouTube, which skews male and young,” Posner said, but the membership analytics are “much less clear than the general analytics.” So Vox plans to run a member survey in the next week or two. For now, it’s pretty much only communicating with members through the YouTube channel, though it has a handful of email addresses of the people who signed up for that first advisory board meeting.

On the editorial front, the production of content for the Video Lab has fit in fairly seamlessly, said Mona Lalwani, executive producer for Vox.com video. The team already generates plenty of extra content in making its main videos, so sharing the extras hasn’t been too much of a lift. But Vox shifted two employees to work full-time on Video Lab member growth and retention. “There is literally nothing harder than launching something new. This is new to Vox, to YouTube, and to the video engagement team,” Hickman said. “That would be my biggest piece of advice [to other companies trying this]: [Audience] is at minimum a one-person full-time job.”

Each of the six episodes of the second season of Conception is about four minutes long and focuses on the trickiness of parenting in 2018: “What is it like to parent in the context of major cultural, social and political shifts, such as #MeToo, the immigration discussion, the opioid crisis and the gun debate? How do we raise children in a world that already sees them — and you — in a certain way?” The format of each episode is the same: One parent’s story, in their own words and voice, told over animation. Here, for instance, is “Why I Won’t Teach My Son ‘Black Codes.'”

The audio for each episode is distilled from a long (between 90 minutes and three hours) in-person interview conducted by Times visual journalist and editor Margaret Cheatham Williams, who came up with the idea for the series in the first place.

“We’re a subscription business, so we’ve been looking a lot at binge-watching and creating a body of work that, when people find one, they will spend time with multiple episodes,” said Nancy Donaldson Gauss, the Times’ executive director of video. In the first season of Conception, 10 percent of viewers watched three or more episodes in one session. Releasing episodes in batches, as curated playlists, was key for enabling that behavior.

The big social and video platforms are a part of the Times’ promotion of the series, but only a part, said Francesca Barber, director of audience growth and programming for video. For instance, the Times will also post some of the episodes as Instagram Stories, and it will post clips to Twitter. It will also release one episode per week, for six weeks, to YouTube. But the main goal is to keep readers on the Times’ site — so Conception will be promoted across multiple Times newsletters and on article pages.

“The fact that we are able to create this binge-watching behavior on our platform is really unique and exciting for us,” said Barber. “That’s something that we’re continuing to look at.”

In June 2016, Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s VP for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, spent several minutes of a panel at a Fortune conference talking about how Facebook was witnessing video overtake text.

“We’re seeing a year-on-year decline on text,” Mendelsohn answered. “We’re seeing a massive increase, as I’ve said, on both pictures and video. So I think, yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say: Video, video, video.”

“Wow,” the moderator, Pattie Sellers, responded.

“The best way to tell stories, in this world where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn continued. “It commands so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually, the trend helps us to digest more of the information, in a quicker way.”

“Five years to all video” wasn’t just Mendelsohn’s line — it came from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. “We’re entering this new golden age of video,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News in April 2016. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”

But even as Facebook executives were insisting publicly that video consumption was skyrocketing, it was becoming clear that some of the metrics the company had used to calculate time spent on videos were wrong. The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2016, three months after the Fortune panel, that Facebook had “vastly overestimated average viewing time for video ads on its platform for two years” by as much as “60 to 80 percent.” The company apologized in a blog post: “As soon as we discovered the discrepancy, we fixed it.”

A lawsuit filed by a group of small advertisers in California, however, argues that Facebook had known about the discrepancy for at least a year — and behaved fraudulently by failing to disclose it.

If that is true, it may have had enormous consequences — not just for advertisers deciding to shift resources from television to Facebook, but also for news organizations, which were grappling with how to allocate editorial staff and what kinds of content creation to prioritize. News publishers’ “pivot to video” was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real for news video too — even if people within those publishers doubted the trend based on their own experiences, and even as research conducted by outside organizations continued to suggest that the video trend was overblown and that news readers preferred text. (Heidi N. Moore put many of these trends together in 2017, and her accounting is only strengthened by the new information that we’re seeing this week.)

The court case was unsealed this week, following efforts by organizations like the online publishers’ trade organization Digital Content Next to make previously redacted parts available to the public. I read the filing and pulled out some of the most interesting and relevant parts for news publishers below. I wanted to try to see whether Facebook’s active promotion of its video offerings might have influenced news publishers’ allocations of resources, and whether it is reasonable to allege that Facebook knew, as publisher after publisher laid off editorial staff and pushed into video, that that was misguided. I wanted to know whether people working in news organizations were fired based on faulty data provided by a giant platform that publishers believed they could trust.

We may not be able to pinpoint exactly what Facebook knew when. We don’t know all the factors that went into individual publishers’ decisions to pivot to video; we can’t see their individual analytics, what they had confirmed by third-party sources versus what they were only getting from Facebook. And it’s impossible to separate out how much of that pivot was a desperate move made at a time when things were already bad, from how much the pivot itself made things worse.

What does seem clear now is that Facebook’s executives’ statements about video should not have been a factor in news publishers’ decisions to lay off their editorial staffs. But it’s hard not to conclude that publishers heard that rhapsodizing about the future and assumed that Facebook knew better than they did, that Facebook’s data must be more accurate than their own data was, that Facebook was perceiving something that they could not. That their own eyes were wrong.

One thing to keep in mind as you read the below: Facebook employees are quoted, but the quotes aren’t attributed. Without viewing the source emails or reports, we don’t know the context of what was said, and we don’t know who, for instance, said the company decided to “obfuscate the fact that we screwed up the math” — was it a junior coder or (probably not) Mark Zuckerberg? We don’t know from the filing how far up the food chain the discussion of errors went.

For its part, Facebook told me in a statement, “This lawsuit is without merit and we’ve filed a motion to dismiss these claims of fraud. Suggestions that we in any way tried to hide this issue from our partners are false. We told our customers about the error when we discovered it — and updated our help center to explain the issue.”

The surges in video viewership that we at Nieman Lab heard about in 2016 and 2017 didn’t seem to make intuitive sense in the context of news video. Who were all these people watching tons of video on Facebook when nobody we knew in real life, including ourselves, was actually watching video on Facebook? But it was easy to write off those concerns: We must be too media bubble-y, too old (even though half our staff writers were in their early twenties), to recognize what was really going on.

Raise your hand if you were ever in a mtg thinking to yourself “really? Video? I hate video! I never watch video!” And then deciding you must be old and washed bc data https://t.co/SoJrJHpqUq

— Emily Yoshida (@emilyyoshida) October 17, 2018

It’s impossible to say whether media executives felt the way we did, or whether they actually did watch a lot of news video and truly believed it was the future. What is clear, however, is that plenty of news publishers made major editorial decisions and laid off writers based on what they believed to be unstoppable trends that would apply to the news business:

— Mic (August 2017): “We made these tough decisions because we believe deeply in our vision to make Mic the leader in visual journalism and we need to focus the company to deliver on our mission.” [Facebook’s Mendelsohn, 2015: “Visual communication allows us to sustain the break-neck pace of modern life in a world where we’re sending nearly four billion emails a day and checking our phones at least four times an hour…We couldn’t handle all this information if an increasingly large part of it wasn’t visual.”]

— Vice (July 2017): “Vice Media is laying off about 2 percent of its 3,000 employees across multiple departments while at the same time the company is looking expand internationally and ramp up video production.”

“Cutting jobs is necessary to put more resources into video production, a Vice spokesman said.”

— MTV News, June 2017: “While we’re proud of the longform editorial work from the past two years, we’re returning the editorial operation to its roots of amplifying the audiences’ voices and shifting resources into short-form video content more in line with young people’s media consumption habits.”

— Fox Sports, June 2017: “We will be shifting our resources and business model away from written content and instead focus on our fans’ growing appetite for premium video across all platforms.”

— Vocativ, June 2017: “We’ve seen a shift in digital publishing in favor of distribution on social media and other platforms, along with a dramatic increase in demand for captivating video content…Today, we are announcing that Vocativ will shift to an all-video format…This means that we will be phasing out written stories.”

— Bleacher Report, February 2017: “A majority of the cuts were within the editorial operations department…With Bleacher Report investing more on higher-quality content, including original video and prominent writers like Howard Beck, these positions were no longer necessary to the company.”

— Mashable, April 2016: “We are now equally adept at telling
 stories in text and video, and those stories now live on social
 networks, over-the-top services and TV. Our ads live there too, with
 branded content now at the center of our ad offering.

 To reflect these changes, we must organize our teams in a different
 way. Unfortunately this has led us to a very tough decision. Today we
 must part ways with some of our colleagues in order to focus our
 efforts.”

Even as publishers were making these pronouncements, however, outside research often didn’t back up their claims that news consumers craved video or preferred it to text. Take this report from The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in the summer of 2016:

Analyzing Chartbeat data from 30 news outlets across the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Italy (17 of the outlets were American, nine were broadcasters), the researchers found that the sites’ users spent ‘only around 2.5 percent of average visit time’ on pages that included videos, and ‘97.5 percent of time is still spent with text.’ That 2.5 percent of time spent was even lower than the total share of pages that have videos (6.5 percent)…

‘So far, the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand,’ Antonis Kalogeropoulos, one of the report’s authors, said in a statement.

Or more research from Reuters in 2016:

Or here’s Pew in 2016, suggesting that the fears we just weren’t young enough to get it were unfounded:

“When asked whether one prefers to read, watch or listen to their news, younger adults are far more likely than older ones to opt for text, and most of that reading takes place on the web.”

Or this report from analytics firm Parse.ly in January 2017:

Parse.ly examined the performance of four types of posts within its network of 700 sites: long-form, short-form, video, and slideshows. Video posts received 30 percent less engaged time than the average post, the study found.

“I don’t want writers to go out of business,” Fortune’s Sellers said at that panel in 2016.

“You have to write for the video,” Mendelsohn pointed out.

The Post’s plans for the platform include “postgame” coverage of major news events hosted by political reporter Libby Casey and a series called Playing Games with Politicians, in which political reporter Dave Weigel will interview politicians while playing video games. On Monday, the Post streamed coverage of Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Twitch — which is owned by Amazon, whose CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post — can be thought of as a cross between YouTube and a Reddit AMA. Accounts host live video feeds of content (usually video games) and viewers speak to each other in a chat feature. (If anyone’s actually watching.) It has 15 million daily active users and over 2.2 million broadcasters; 81.5 percent of users are male, and 55 percent are between the ages of 18 and 34 — in other words, a hard-to-reach demographic for political news. Video game journalists frequently use Twitch to review games or cover conferences like E3, but political coverage is less common.

The Post has experimented with Twitch before. “Our first streaming experiment on Twitch was for Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony on Capitol Hill,” Phoebe Connelly, the Post’s deputy digital director, said in a press release, “and the real-time conversations and engagement showed us there was interest in news and analysis on the service.”

The more personable, organic approach to the news that the Post is aiming for on Twitch is part of “dressing for the party,” Casey told me. These streams hosted by her and Weigel are an extension of the Post’s ambition to “meet the readers where they are.” (The Post does something analogous on Reddit, which reaches a similar if not identical demographic.)

Twitch is a labor-intensive social platform. It’s popular among e-sports gamers and YouTube personalities who play games as a way to attract new viewers, who might then be inspired to support the content creator on more profitable platforms. But it’s not a big money-maker for most broadcasters. Users can subscribe to a channel to support a streamer for $4.99 per month; ads run during breaks in the feed or before.

Users tend to go to Twitch to hang out with friends rather than to engage in political discussion. But the early response to the Post’s effort to create “a space for civil discourse on issues of the day” has been positive. As many as 1,000 people watched the Post’s coverage of the Trump/Putin meeting on Twitch on Monday. User jeanviper commented, “This s*** was hilarious thanks for the content.” The Post’s channel now has more than 14,000 followers, who receive email notifications as broadcasts begin.

Casey said that she thought the first broadcast “went fabulously…it’s like a version of C-SPAN for a younger audience.”

IAB’s study — which surveyed 4,200 people in 21 countries around the world — found 71 percent said they were extremely or probably likely to watch matches live on TV, versus 65 percent online.

In some countries, digital streaming actually beat TV — including in China (+6 percentage points), Russia (+7), Saudi Arabia (+2), United Arab Emirates (+1), and even the United States (+1). (American soccer fans have lots of unused rooting capacity ready to assign to one of the 32 countries that actually qualified for the finals.) The most disproportionately pro-TV countries are in Europe: Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Hungary.

The trend is also clear if you look at devices: TVs barely edge out smartphones as a platform where fans will watch games, 39 to 36 percent. (“Smart TV” got 29 percent, but it isn’t clear in the study whether that meant the “TV” respondents all meant, well, dumb TVs.)

World Cup data is only a small part of the overall report, which looks at live video habits worldwide. In all, 67 percent of those surveyed said they had consumed live video content on one platform or another, and 47 percent said they were streaming more live video today than a year ago.

Overall, both video and live video consumption are somewhat higher in the global south than in North America and Europe. Frequency of digital video consumption was highest in South America (where 80 percent say they watch online video at least daily); live digital video is a big hit in the Middle East (90 percent say they’ve watched a livestream, versus 67 percent in North America).

For streaming video content shorter than 30 minutes, smartphones and tablets were more popular than other devices. For video longer than 30 minutes, more people turned to smart TVs, OTT devices, gaming consoles, and their computers:

Globally, news wasn’t anywhere near the top most popular categories of live video content people were streaming. The top type of content unsurprisingly was TV shows. Live news video makes a respectable showing — but more people watch esports and Let’s Play streamers, for heaven’s sake.

Live video content preferences, though, varied by country. Among the South American respondents, live sports video was more popular, and in Saudi Arabia and UAE, live news video and video by family and friends were popular. When people more often stream live video varied country to country as well. In China, for instance, evenings are an active time:

This is an IAB study, so of course questions covered consumer behavior and attitudes towards advertising during live video. More video consumers globally would rather watch free video with ads inserted than pay for a subscription service — though this, too, varies by region, with MENA users unusually interested in pay-per-video streams:

The IAB conducted the 29-question survey in April and May of this year; the full list of markets covered is Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. You can read the full report here.

“Dogs and cats always make us laugh! ”

I admit to watching these videos after linking to them here.

Perhaps surprisingly, “seven of the ten most engaged Facebook video posts in 2018 so far [came] in at three minutes or longer, and the average across the ten [was] three minutes eleven seconds.” Motivational speaker Jay Shetty pops up multiple times in the most popular/most commented/most engaged list, and “the most frequently appearing names were the viral publishers such as NTD Funniest or UNILAD.” Meanwhile, “only a couple [videos] came from what you might call traditional mainstream publishers, with ABC News and Fox News both featuring once in the 100 most engaged Facebook videos.” The closest thing I saw to any news video in any of NewsWhip’s charts was a video from millennial-aimed business video site Cheddar on “how to never fold your clothes again,” featuring a gadget called the FoldiMate.

NewsWhip’s findings may make you doubt, again, again, if Facebook has really changed all that much. Meanwhile, The Weather Channel has stopped publishing videos to Facebook completely. One choice quote from exec Neil Katz: “We went along for the ride every single step of the way. But we noticed, over the course of two years, that we were being paid in all types of currencies — followers, shares, views — that did not feel like money.”

2018 is likely to finally be the year that more Americans get news online than from TV (we were almost there last year). Right now, it’s primarily an older crowd that watches TV news: 58 percent of those over 65 often get news from cable, for instance, versus just 10 percent of those 18 to 29, according to Pew.

But — young people have to get their hard news video somewhere, right? (Uh…right?) Enter Facebook and Netflix. Twin reports yesterday: Facebook is launching a hard news section on its Watch portal (as Campbell Brown had previously suggested at Recode’s Code Media conference). Axios’s Sara Fischer reported that “Facebook is in touch with both legacy and digital-first news publishers to test a daily video feature that would run for at least a year,” and content would need to be at least three minutes long.

Netflix, meanwhile, seems to be thinking something much longer than three minutes: It’s reportedly planning a “weekly news magazine show” to rival 60 Minutes and 20/20. “Netflix has spotted a hole in the market for a current affairs TV show encompassing both sides of the political divide and [is] seeking to fill it,” an unidentified source told MarketWatch.

The success of The New York Times’ The Daily with young audiences seems like a positive sign for a Netflix news show: The Times announced in October that two-thirds of The Daily’s listeners are under 40 and more than a third are 30 or younger. Meanwhile, even back in 2012, more than half of 60 Minutes’ audience was 55 or older. And Netflix has already found success as a platform for documentaries; perhaps it could optimize some of its news output to have a longer life on the service.

The potential for Facebook seems less clear. For one thing, Facebook and its video experiments garner approximately zero goodwill among publishers these days.

I don't get you, Facebook. It has annoyed news outlets by fanning then ignoring multiple news video projects, and now it's trying again at a trough in publishers' trust in the platform? https://t.co/sCbKCLgQzE

— Shira Ovide (@ShiraOvide) March 13, 2018

Facebook is "trying to create more meaningful engagement on its platform" by launching a new video silo that doesn't have monetization capacity or metrics to measure its success. OK. https://t.co/HAk2TymInr

— Margarita Noriega (@margarita) March 13, 2018

Brown had said at Code Media that “hard-news video is really hard to monetize, it just is.” It’s also not really what people come to Facebook to watch.

LittleThings CEO Joe Spieser and president Gretchen Tibbits wrote in a memo to staff about the company’s closure that Facebook’s news feed changes were “catastrophic” and led to a 75 percent drop in organic traffic for the publisher. “No previous algorithm update ever came close to this level of decimation.” Business Insider has the full memo here:

As most of you remember, we took some especially large setbacks in August 2017, but were able to quickly right the ship, and rebuild the company with new business lines and revenue streams. Instead of waiting for the next Facebook newsfeed update, we entered into a sale-process in November that would allow us to merge with a large media entity that could bring our business diversification of both traffic and revenue. By early February we had numerous acquisition offers for LittleThings that would have generated a substantial return for everyone’s options, as well as guarantee their careers well into the future.

Unfortunately, as we were receiving those offers a full on catastrophic update to Facebook’s algorithm took effect. The prioritization of friends/family content over publishers was the last straw.

At 10am ET, LittleThings’ last live morning show, Refresh, turned to the absurd and then sadness as its hosts cried, expressed surprise that the company was shutting down so abruptly, talked about leaving New York (“New York is awful”), and thanked colleagues and community. Mournful comments flooded the page.

There are other social publishers working in the same vein as LittleThings to watch:

here comes the schadenfreude https://t.co/PmAHXGEN5Q

— Lucia Moses (@lmoses) February 28, 2018

remember Zynga?

— Jack Marshall (@JackMarshall) February 28, 2018

NBC Left Field, a 12-person experimental video unit, launched last July with a simple but strategically vital mandate: to experiment with new ways of reporting, producing, and delivering video news, with a special focus on the habits and preferences of younger news consumers. It’s one part digital video unit, one part emerging technology incubator.

The unit’s early projects offer a glimpse of what that future might look like. In a recent video about the reality of New Year’s resolutions, Left Field used Tilt Brush, Google’s virtual reality 3D painting technology, to illustrate points in real-time. The video is a follow up to a similar “mixed reality” video that explains the neurological roots of outrage, which was broadcast on Facebook Live. Other videos have recreated the moon landing, tried to recreate the sound of tinnitus, and attempted to spend Jeff Bezos’ fortune.

Matt Danzico, head of Left Field, said that the Tilt Brush video was one of the unit’s most exciting projects so far because it offers a vision of how video producers can use virtual reality to unlock new ways of telling familiar stories. The tech is also deceptively simple to use. Because the on-screen elements are rendered in real time, they require no post-processing work, letting creators experiment quickly and easily. The New Year’s resolution video, for example, took just five hours to edit, which is a big deal for a team with a relatively small number of people. Left Field is already thinking about other applications of the Tilt Brush technology, such as applying it to segments of live news broadcasts.

“We saw what people were already doing with animation and we thought it was all great, but we wanted to think about what animation will look like four years down the road and go there,” said Danzico. “I don’t know if this is the future — none of us do — but it’s part of our mission to try it out.”

But Nick Ascheim, head of digital at NBC News, stressed that Left Field wasn’t developed to experiment for the sake of experimenting. Instead, the unit has a very real mission to help NBC News learn as much as it can about what kinds of video production and delivery resonate with younger news consumers, something that has real, bottom-line implications for the company. Just eight percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say they often get their news from network television, compared with 49 percent of Americans over 65, according to Pew Research. The picture wasn’t much better for cable, where only 10 percent of young Americans say they often get their news, Pew found.

Ascheim says he’s aware of the challenge. “We know a great deal about how to make linear television and we’ve been doing it a very long time, but there is a generation of people who currently don’t have cable subscriptions, and who won’t have cable subscriptions, that are beginning to form different habits around how they consume news,” he said. “I think we’ve learned a lot over the last 10 to 15 years about how those people are consuming text, but video is still an open question.”

He added that this is why he’s also concerned about the idea of “long-term” experimentation, which implies that direct applications of experiments are still a long way off. “We have to start answering these questions right now. It’s important for us to put some real investment in it, not just in dollars but also in creative energy, to come to an answer.”

Beyond experimenting with new technology, Left Field has also spent a lot of time honing its take on documentary filmmaking, which is built around, as Ascheim puts it, “helping viewers understand the humans around them.” Left Field’s most popular video on YouTube, where it has 24,000 subscribers, focuses on the Proud Boys, a group of men’s right’s activists in Texas. Other successful videos have covered human rights abuses in the Philippines, what South Korean teens think of North Koreans, and a Swedish museum for failed inventions. The documentaries are short, well produced, and designed for consumption on YouTube and-the-top video platforms.

Much of what Left Field has done so far would have been harder to pull off if the unit were housed alongside the rest of NBC’s staffers, Danzico argued. While he admitted he was initially skeptical about operating out of a coworking space, it’s ultimately been a boon to the operation, which benefits from its proximity to other small startups and from being away from the day-to-day bustle of NBC News headquarters. “I can let people go into a room for two straight months and come up with this new and different hardware and a video offering. They would not have had that chance if someone was standing over them and looking at their every move,” he said.

At the same time, Left Field is focused on making sure that its ideas trickle up into the larger NBC News operation. To that end, various NBC departments make almost daily visits to the Left Field offices to discuss projects, share best practices, and figure out how they can work with the Left Field team.

“It’s a two-way street,” said Ascheim. “We want ideas that they’re pioneering to make their way back to both digital and broadcast, but we also want things we’re doing here to filter into what they’re doing there.”

The top answer, according to a new WAN-IFRA report that surveyed 235 news executives and other managers working in media across 68 countries, was “reluctance to innovate,” followed by concerns over finding new revenue streams and a sustainable business model. (Only 5 percent cited Google and Facebook, though of course they intersect with the business model worries.)

Almost two thirds of those surveyed reported that revenues at their organizations have declined over the past year; about a quarter, though, reported that revenues were up (the “highest proportion of positive responses,” the report mentions, since a version of this study was first conducted in 2009 during the global recession).

The executives surveyed fell into three distinct buckets: Some were staunch defenders of a traditional, mostly advertising-driven revenue model (only eight percent of those surveyed fell into this category). Others wanted their organizations to protect existing revenue streams but also aim to earn about half their income from new sources in the next five years (56 percent of those surveyed). A third group said they wanted their companies to earn more than half their revenue from sources other than advertising and content sales (36 percent).

So what should these companies be investing in to meet those revenue goals? The report found that the top area of investment for publishers surveyed was — wait for it — video.

The top reported short-term priority for the next 12 months was investment in “social media editorial activities” (79 percent of respondents said that was “high priority”), according to the survey, followed by “developing new products within the media sector” (78 percent). There were a few sort of alarming areas executives indicated were “low priority” (80 percent, for “more diverse workforce”):

The survey was led by WAN-IFRA and François Nel and Dr Coral Milburn-Curtis of the Innovation Research Group and conducted in 11 languages across six continents: Africa, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Europe, North America, and South America. The report, which includes several guest analyses on everything from company culture change to broad-stroke ideas for dealing with revenue decline, is available here. (It’s free for WAN-IFRA members, €250 for others.)

If you haven’t yet waded into Watch — the original video tab that Facebook launched earlier this month — then please know that somebody else spent the equivalent of a day there and then wrote up what he found. Henry Goldman, who was head of video at BuzzFeed News until last month, watched 24 hours of video on Facebook Watch (over the course of about a week) to “to figure out what might work and what seems weird, at least, so far.” (He even made a spreadsheet to track what he watched.)

A few of his notes:

— “I watched a total of 162 ‘shows,’ with an average run time of 8.9 minutes.” Some videos on Facebook Watch are over an hour. “The reason I didn’t watch these is, well, I really didn’t want to. But also, seeing how few views these samples were getting, it didn’t feel necessary to devote an 1/8th of the time of the experiment to checking them out. It’s not yet a real use-case for the platform.”

— He particularly liked a show by NowThis News, Apocalypse NowThis.

“It’s kind of got everything I would think publishers would want in a show: a likeable recurring host, a format and title that explains exactly what the show is, and a subject matter that has lots of different directions you can go, many of which will be shareable as a kind of PSA to your friends. One week it’s, ‘We’re all gonna die by Nuclear holocaust.’ The next it’s ‘we’re all gonna die by global warming.’ Clever.” He also liked Refinery 29’s scripted show Strangers.

— There are a lot of videos of podcast interviews (those, along with live sports and some radio shows, are contributing to the bulk of the hour-long-plus videos). “I suspect it will be a little while before hour-plus conversation shows become a high-performing format in FB, though making use of Live functionality might help.”

— “There’s plenty of shows that represent my least favorite internet video form, what I call ‘Shittier, Cheaper TV,’ or SCTV for short.” (Apologies to Bob and Doug McKenzie.)

— Discovery isn’t great yet, “but algorithmic recommendation is the kind of thing you can expect Facebook to improve upon.”

— He thinks that Watch will work, but probably not in the way the company expects. “When they introduced video in 2014 (and throttled the amount of shares any YouTube video could get on the platform), I don’t think they said, ‘In 2 years, there will be BILLIONS of views for text-driven, audio-optional, 60-second viral food videos.’ (If anyone DID say that, then hats off to you.)”

The post is here.

These kinds of videos have become a familiar sight on The Washington Post over the past few months. In June, the Post tapped Veep actor Brian Huskey to reenact Anthony Scaramucci’s now-infamous on-the-record phone call New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza. And in a recent video titled “Mean Boys: Dancing on the Debt Ceiling,” The Post explained the mounting debt ceiling crisis in the style of a character from the 2004 film Mean Girls.

For a newspaper whose new-ish slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” has been criticized by readers for being “demoralizing” and disturbing, the comedy videos can feel out of place. But Michelle Jaconi, executive producer of creative at the Post, argues otherwise: If you want more people to pay attention to the news, start by making them laugh.

“We have to give people different entry points to the news,” she said. She noted that The Washington Post has won three Pulitzer Prizes for its editorial cartooning, which she argued makes the humor videos less of a leap for a newspaper than people might think. “Humor is something the Post has always done. There’s already this great heritage and there is always a need to poke at the preciousness of people in power, whether they be media people or a company like Apple.”

Jaconi, who joined the Post from Independent Journal Review in April, has been charged with helping to staff The Washington Post’s video team, which has grown rapidly since the newspaper announced its ambitious three-year video expansion plans earlier this year. The newspaper started 2017 with a video team of 40 people; now that number hovers around 60, and is likely to pass 70 by the end of the year.

In particular, Jaconi is focused on what Washington Post director of video Micah Gelman calls “destination video content,” which is different in style and substance from the kinds of video that the Post runs alongside the articles on its website. “The video we produce as part of the core reporting team is not something you come to us for. You come across that video while reading,” Gelman said. “Michelle’s very difficult task is to figure out how we get people to think of us as a video destination. That destination does not have to be washingtonpost.com.”

This so-called “distributed content” strategy has moved from novelty to table stakes for publishers in just a few years. Like most publishers today, the Post is intent on using platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Apple News to increase the number of people it reaches with its videos. But embracing that strategy has also meant experimenting with both new story forms (“we’re not prescriptive about format,” said Gelman) as well as topics. Beyond politics, Jaconi’s team is experimenting with videos on subjects like health, food, and culture that are most primed to find big audiences on the social platforms.

Another core strategic imperative to the Post’s expanding video work is, as Jaconi puts it, “putting faces on the institution” of the Washington Post. This idea is core to the Post’s “Hate Mail” series, in which Post luminaries such as George Will and and Erik Wemple read readers’ comments from their articles and columns. These videos are designed to be both entertaining and to introduce viewers to the personalities behind the columns and stories they read on WashingtonPost.com.

This idea of creating a more visual representation of the Washington Post brand has also driven Jaconi’s focus on hiring on-screen talent such as Nicole Ellis from CNN, Hannah Jewell from Buzzfeed UK, and Anna Rothschild, the host of Gross Science, a YouTube series developed by NOVA and PBS Digital Studios. These reporters, she said, have the natural curiosity of journalists combined with the experience of working alongside small, fast-moving news video teams. “Now is a really important time for us to show, not just, tell what journalists do,” Jaconi said.

Gelman said that the primary challenge for The Washington Post’s video operation is figuring out how to “reposition the Post as a video-focused brand” while also continuing to invest in everything else the newspaper already produces. Unlike at Mic and MTV News, where text-based reporters have been laid off as part of the companies’ larger strategic shifts to video, The Washington Post wants video to exist in addition to its text reporting, not instead of it.

But building that video mindshare among viewers is a long-term process, as Gelmen stressed. “How do we get people to wake up in the morning or sit down on their couch in the evening and seek out the videos that we publish? That’s our big question,” he said.

We do not believe video comes at the cost of our journalism or people with non-video skillsets. Writing is a crucial component of what we want to offer our audiences — as is photography, video, sound, graphics, and illustrations. To do this work, we need different skills across the board — writers and researchers and reporters and visual journalists and video producers and audio producers (not to mention legal help and equipment managers and talent bookers) — all are necessary to our mix. Great videos don’t emerge from the ether, or from a desire to make more money from higher advertising rates. Great videos emerge out of great journalism, a great creative culture, and deep collaboration with creators of many different kinds.

The kicker for Vox Media is that it can actually brag that it does video really well, much better than some of the publishers that are trying to “pivot” to it. It’s nominated for four Emmys this year, putting it in the enviable position of being able to uphold its principles both internally and publicly while also, you know, benefiting from video.

Going unspoken, but also evident here, is the fact that Vox Media has the resources to do all of these things while a more struggling class of online publisher does not. Last week, in her much-read post “On Mic.com and minority life in startup media,” Meredith Talusan touched on some of this.

Haik has made a persuasive case for how video can not only be more profitable, but a better experience for Mic’s demographic. Of course, the problem with this is that a pivot to video also requires a reapportionment of skills across Mic’s newsroom, which I imagine was the reason why people got laid off, as they did in other organizations. I empathize with those employees, and wish that they could have been given a chance to re-train or demonstrate their skills prior to getting the axe. But I also know that the cut-throat world of digital startups makes it very hard to invest in training for employees  —  who often don’t have time to get trained to begin with — so it’s easier to just hire people who already have the skills companies need. That’s also an industrywide problem, and I don’t have enough experience to evaluate the degree to which unions can help, though I imagine that those employees would be in a better position had Mic been unionized.

What does seem clear is that the idea that digital media companies will be able to hire tons of young, cheap employees who are “good at everything” is not panning out.

If you’re in the mood for some pivot-to-video-criticizing tweet threads, check these out:

With the news that yet another publication is "laying off staff to pivot to video", I wanted to return to what is driving these moves.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 17, 2017

I'm so proud to work with the best digital video team on earth. A few thoughts in recognition of their Emmy nominations.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 25, 2017

One standout amongst that list of national and international news organizations was McClatchy’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the only local news organization counted among Facebook Watch’s first batch of partners. The Star-Telegram’s sole Facebook Watch project is “Titletown, TX,” a documentary series that follows local high school football team the Aledo Bearcats as they win the 2016 Texas state championship. The series wasn’t produced with Watch in mind; the paper originally published the series last year. But for the newspaper, Facebook Watch could be both a viable way to attract new viewers to its existing work and an important way for the newspaper to experiment with creating serialized video for a much larger audience.

“We’ve already produced this series and we’ve already shared this series with our audience. Facebook gives us an opportunity to broaden our audience to a degree that we couldn’t imagine if the Watch platform does what folks envision it will do,” said Lauren Gustus, executive editor of the Star-Telegram. “For us, there’s a great opportunity to continue to experiment our way to success.”

“Titletown, TX” checks a lot of boxes for Facebook. With Watch, the social network is trying to solve what has become a particularly sticky issue as it broadens its push into video: While people are watching plenty of videos on Facebook, vanishingly few are going to Facebook with that task in mind (unlike, say, with YouTube). Instead, video is just one of many content formats that appear in the News Feed. For advertisers, which typically value viewers who click a play button more than those who watch an autoplayed video as they scroll, a solution has been long overdue. This is why high-quality video series like “Titletown, TX” are so key to Watch, which is designed to develop intentional, habitual video viewing habits in Facebook users.

“If you catch users on Facebook with a 20-minute documentary, that’s probably not going to work for them. But if you can send them to a landing page that has a number of options that they bookmark and watch later, that’s more in line with how we’re consuming visual content in the digital space right now,” Gustus said.

Efforts like “Titletown, TX,” are still uncommon among local news organizations, according to Gustus. While the production costs attached to video continue to shrink, they’re still far higher than those of text. For many smaller organizations, video isn’t always easy to integrate into existing, print-centered workflows. And most local news organizations are still in the early stages of building out their own internal video operations and expertise — or rebuilding them from past iterations.

McClatchy realized these challenges back in 2014 when it created the McClatchy Video Lab, a team designed to tie together the video efforts across McClatchy newsrooms, which had historically operated independently on this front. Beyond producing videos for the various distribution platforms and creating videos for advertisers, the video lab is also charged with supporting local newsrooms in their own efforts to reach new audiences online. The unit was particularly instrumental with “Titletown, TX”; Jessica Koscielniak, a McClatchy video journalist based in Washington, D.C., temporarily relocated to Texas to produce the project alongside reporters at the Star-Telegram — a move that was vital to the production.

Such collaborations have becoming increasingly important strategically for McClatchy and its local properties. While the production’s focus on a local sports team made it particularly relevant to Texas locals, “Titletown, TX,” was also developed to be compelling to a much larger group of viewers outside of the state. “It’s not just a Texas story. It plays well everywhere,” said Andy Pergam, vice president of video and new ventures at McClatchy. “You want everyone in north Texas to be watching this because it’s important to what’s happening around them, but people in you-name-the-city also love the story behind it. That was always why we wanted to make sure we were working on this together.”

This is why Facebook’s Watch could be so important to McClatchy’s video efforts. Pergam said that while pushing video out on Facebook obviously comes with the promise of a much larger base of potential viewers, McClatchy is also intrigued by how viewers engage with content on Watch. Facebook says that one of its main goals with Watch is to help creators develop communities of passionate fans — intense viewers of series and evangelists for them. Features such as Watch’s ability to let users see what series their friends are following and comment on specific moments in episodes could help deepen that engagement.

“Watch is appealing because it’s not just about getting as many of those singular people watching, but also developing a community of people intrigued by the content who want to watch together,” said Pergam.

While Watch’s limited early userbase means that there are few insights yet into how videos are performing on the feature, the Star-Telegram is already thinking about what future projects could be a good fit for the new feature. The newspaper is in the early stages of a video project following a college as it builds a new football team from scratch. It’s a story that, like “Titletown, TX,” is likely to hook both local and not-so-local viewers, according to Gustus.

“The key for any local publisher is to continue to produce content that their communities care about,” she said. “But with Facebook Watch, you’ve also got an opportunity to go a lot broader. The big question is: What are the threads or themes that you might pull on as you look at developing out concepts for the platform that can reach all those new people?”

Holmes espera que Topic.com, su nuevo proyecto en First Look Media, ayude a reavivar su amor por la web. La publicación, orientada al consumidor y publicada mensualmente, está diseñada para ser la antítesis de los tipos de publicaciones que la llevaron a desilusionarse: en lugar de centrarse en el texto para contar historias, Topic.com es muy visual y gira alrededor del video, la fotografía y la ilustración. Además, los tiempos de desarrollo necesariamente extendidos de estos proyectos visuales implican que Topic.com está, casi por naturaleza, alejado del ciclo diario de las noticias. Al igual que las revistas, tiene tiempo para “respirar” y producir un trabajo más largo, más considerado, dice Holmes.

“No es que crea que seguir el ciclo de las noticias no sea válido, pero es un espacio muy competitivo. No estamos interesados en competir en él”, explica. “Estamos interesados en crear una experiencia que refleje la cultura; no que reaccione a ella”.

An audio-visual journey through the music of West and Central Africa, the Indian Ocean, South Pacific, and Southeast Asia. pic.twitter.com/Y2aZuZqWm1

— Topic (@topicstories) July 14, 2017

Cada número (o “paquete de narrativo”, como lo llaman en First Look Media) de Topic.com se centra en un tema específico. El primero, titulado American Psychosis, se enfocó en las complejidades de la experiencia americana: el artista de hip hop Jean Grae propuso un nuevo himno nacional, mientras que una historia ilustrada de Julia Rothman y Joshua David Stein dio cuenta de la sorprendente realidad de los pequeños enclaves étnicos de los Estados Unidos. El número de agosto se llama “Female Trouble” y el de septiembre se titulará “Rashomon”. Holmes cuenta que aún no existe una ciencia acerca de cómo Topic.com decide sobre el tema de cada mes, aunque al equipo le atraen ideas que son relevantes para ciertas épocas del año (como el debut del 4 de julio, acerca de temas de patriotismo). Otras ideas surgen de proyectos que los creadores que Topic.com quieren explorar. Y otros, como un número sobre animales programado para el próximo año, surgen del mero interés del staff por construir un paquete narrativo sobre el tema (los creadores independientes son el elemento vital de Topic.com. El staff principal es de solo 10 empleados, y el equipo depende de creadores independientes nuevos y reconocidos para brindar la mayor parte del contenido de Topic.com).

Topic.com es un producto del estudio de entretenimiento de First Look Media, Topic, que salió oficialmente al aire a principios de este año. A diferencia de otras operaciones sin fines de lucro de First Look Media, como The Intercept, Topic busca ingresos para la compañía ,en parte mediante el financiamiento y distribución de proyectos independientes como el documental disponible en Netflix Nobody Speaks, acerca del juicio de Hulk Hogan que contribuyó a la quiebra de Gawker. Las producciones de Topic aparecerán en diversas plataformas, incluyendo cine, aplicaciones de podcast, televisión y, por supuesto, Facebook y Twitter.

We asked @JeanGreasy to write and record a new version of the national anthem. The result is nothing short of stunning. pic.twitter.com/nYNGZVFCqh

— Topic (@topicstories) July 3, 2017

La forma en que Topic.com se ajusta a la ambición global del negocio de First Look aun no es clara. Cuando le pregunté a Holmes sobre los planes de ingresos del sitio, un representante de Relaciones Públicas intervino: “En este momento estamos estableciendo la marca y conectándonos con el consumidor”. Aun así, dijo, la puerta está abierta para que Topic.com se asocie con anunciantes de ideas afines.

Vale la pena señalar que mientras Topic.com comparte el ADN editorial del Intercept, el sitio “no es una marca periodística”, según Holmes. Algunas de las historias ofrecen información de actualidad, pero también hay muchos videos guionados u otras creaciones basadas en historias reales. Depende enteramente de la ruta tomada por los creadores.

Este hincapié en los creadores da lugar a lo que Holmes espera que será uno de los grandes sellos de Topic.com en el futuro: impulsar la voz editorial de la publicación sin opacar la voz de los creadores. “Este medio es para ellos”, concluye.

Anyway, Josh does Q&As with people in his newsletter and he asked me. Here’s a copy of our quick exchange over email that ran in this morning’s edition.

Take 56 million, the number of views VGTV has gotten so far on its “satirical masterpiece” of “tupéfabrikk,” the company’s discovery of Donald Trump’s secret wig field in Tromsø, Norway’s Arctic Circle city. But that bump is just a collateral benefit of VGTV’s innovation engine.

In the three and a half years since its founding, VGTV has become a global model, with its leaders speaking at numerous media forums.

This spring, the latest spun-off Schibsted division passed an important milestone: VGTV, the video operation of the leading Norwegian daily VG, now produces more monthly advertising revenue than does VG’s seven-day print product. VG, like many dailies, is losing double digit percentages of print revenue each year, but that revenue loss is being made up by the video operation. Of course, the new money is not nearly as profitable as the old — but for Schibsted, it’s all about the all-in bet on the longer-term digital future.

“What I hear [from journalists at conferences] is that people get inspired…that we are optimistic of the fact that we think we are going to manage to monetize video,” explains Helje Solberg, VGTV’s CEO and editor. Solberg moved over to VGTV more than three years ago, after serving for nine years as VG’s executive managing editor.

In 2016, VGTV pulled in 83 million Norwegian kroner, or about $10 million in total revenue. Into early 2017, it’s now seeing a steep ramp in growth, with a 51 percent increase year over year in the first quarter.

It’s not simply a maturing of the market — it’s audience growth. Year over year, VGTV grew audience 29 percent, accounting for 420,000 daily unique users in the first quarter. It can count more than 25 million video streams started per month, or almost a million a day.

That’s a good number given the sparsely populated northern terrain — Norway’s only got 5 million people.

Given that small, well-read population, why do so many publishers buttonhole Solberg at media events?

First and foremost, it’s the unique story of Schibsted’s serial and widening innovation. Schibsted is the biggest publisher most other publishers have never heard about. Based in Oslo, with strong newspaper publishing positions in both its home country and Sweden, Schibsted has become a Top 10 global company in revenue among legacy news providers, with operations in 30 countries and three continents, employing almost 7,000 people. As one executive of the now hyper-innovative Washington Post recently told me: “We like Schibsted. Some smart people there.”

Today, Schibsted’s media houses (publishing) contribute about 25 percent of its overall revenues, with the company’s marketplace/classifieds business and “growth” divisions still generating good growth. (We’ve chronicled Schibsted here at the Lab for years.)

It’s the innovation at Schibsted’s media houses that compels attention — for its early impact, its restructuring, and its results, with VGTV only the latest installment. The most recent critical result: Schibsted’s Norwegian news businesses now show small growth. In the first quarter, revenues were up 4 percent, with earnings (EBITDA) up 8 percent.

Overall, for VG (a popular Oslo daily, which operates alongside Aftenposten, Schibsted’s “quality” daily), the numbers show that investments in innovation are paying off. In the first quarter, VG saw 27 percent growth in digital subscribers (to 108,000) and a 28 percent growth in digital advertising, a good amount of that attributable to VGTV. Another good print-to-digital crossover number: Operating expenses were down 7 percent.

As it crosses over, the video strategy fits well with Schibsted’s vision of a next-generation platform vision. That plan emphasizes a signed-in engagement that seeks to compete against the always-signed-in world of Facebook.

For innovation watchers, the short story of the Schibsted model is clear: Transforming the news business means separate and reintegrate, separate and reintegrate. That’s what Schibsted did in 1999 when, ahead of its peers, it funded a separate — and competitive to print for audience — digital operation. Later, it did the same with mobile.

Then, in late October 2013, it applied the successful model once again, to video and VGTV. Both “digital” and “mobile” have been folded back into the VG mothership. Solberg says she expects that VGTV will be soon as well. Once innovation is well enough established, resourced, and acculturated, it folds back into a bigger, smarter, and now digital savvy newsroom and company.

Today, VGTV includes a staff of 65. They remain organizationally separate from VG, though the operation is housed in the VG offices and works often as if the two are one — which is the point.

When I first wrote about VGTV three years ago, then-VG CEO and editor Torry Pedersen told me of this and other Schibsted forays: “Make sure you lose money for at least three years.” In fact, VGTV first became profitable in April, a few months past its three-year anniversary, says Solberg, though she doesn’t expect 2017 to be in the black overall.

It’s telling that both Solberg and Pedersen have held both top editorial and business-side titles simultaneously. The Schibsted model seems to recognize and promote shapers, and some of those shapers should come from the editorial side of the business as well. Earlier this year, Pedersen, well known and respected in the broader media world, became head of Schibsted’s media house businesses in Norway overall.

Live news, and the challenge of a Facebook-like integrated experience

In those three years, Solberg, a long-time VG news executive, has learned lots about what works and what doesn’t in digital video. She’s now intent on better integrating the VGTV experience into VG’s wider news delivery, and wants to apply lessons from its Snapchat and Facebook tests.

She’s had to make ongoing decisions about the kinds of video VGTV emphasizes. The site offers a lively mix — its offerings translate fairly well with Google Translate — of news, interviews, and popular culture. News and sports lead viewing time, with a variety of other programming, created and licensed, filling out the picture.

Given VG’s overall pre-eminence as a breaking news site, VGTV prizes its advances in live programming. “In the terrorist attack in Belgium last year, it was the first time we documented a major breaking news story with live images before still images,” she says. “Now, that happens again and again. On U.S. election day, more people followed our live coverage than read the most-read article on VG.no.”

For global coverage, VGTV uses both wire services and its own correspondents, transmitting live images from the news spot. Its anchors also host news programs.

“We don’t necessarily go live every day,” says Solberg. “It’s very important for us to go live if there is news that we have to report. All we need to go live is a journalist and an iPhone. The technology works with us. It’s easier and easier to go live.” By the numbers, viewers responded, with “live” viewing more than quadrupling in 2016 over 2015.

At this point, somewhat surprisingly, more viewers watch VGTV on their desktops than on mobile, though in April, mobile topped desktop. Why is desktop so strong? Solberg believes getting the mobile user experience right is one of her greatest challenges. A prime goal: “integrated native video.”

“We need to integrate video much better into the news journey. I used to say that you have peer-based video, [where] users go to the platform to watch video, [and] push-based video. Users go to the platforms again to get updated. Both are served video seamlessly like Facebook. For us, the big question is: Is it possible to challenge the peer-based platforms such as YouTube, that established play channels on time spent? We think we need a different approach. Facebook did some smart moves — it’s muted, it goes very fast, it has no ads interrupting the content — while we have a click-to-play model and interrupting ads.”

So, Solberg’s team studies Facebook, and its new partner, Snapchat. VGTV began producing VG’s first-in-Norway Snapchat Discover channel in January. “Snapchat is a good place to learn and experiment what makes a good video on the mobile phone. We really like it as a place to publish stories. It’s also a good carrier of advertising. It remains to be seen, however, how easy or how difficult this will be to monetize. It’s still an investment case for us. The test period for six months was sold out within two weeks.”

Steady, above-web digital ad rates

In its short history, VGTV has managed to gain healthy ad rate for its video ads — a CPM of 180 kroner, or a little more than $20. That’s better than VG’s average non-video digital ad yield, says Solberg.

Digital video ads come out of digital ad budgets, she says, so in this arena, VG is up against Facebook and Google. Together, the two dominate Nordic digital advertising, with a two-thirds share of the market.

At this point, 15-second pre-rolls predominate, but VGTV is experimenting with shorter forms less than 10 seconds.

“It is possible to tell a story, even in six seconds,” she says. Storytelling is key: It’s noteworthy that, along with VGTV’s increased ad revenues, it’s branded content that has also helped make up for print losses. Initiatives such as The New York Times’ T Brand Studio have found that combination of branded storytelling and video, the virtuous mating of two post-display ad formats.

Solberg hopes to find other ad rhythms that work, just as VGTV is doing editorially. “We saw two years ago most of the clips were, like, two and a half to three minutes. Now they are less — about one minute. But the time spent on VGTV has increased. So we make shorter news videos, but people spend more time with us. We also have a higher completion rate,” says Solberg. “We make the short videos and then we make the longer videos and documentaries and programs.”

“It’s possible to tell a smart story in 43 seconds,” says the former political journalist. She shows me one video — a quick-moving, graphics-centric piece, one that indeed tells its story well in less than a minute.

Very short, or longer and explanatory. The web isn’t a medium medium.

One goal: The digital news leadership

For long-time print journalists like Solberg and Pedersen, “TV” learnings have opened unexpected doors. Yet, all the efforts remain focused on a singular goal, which Solberg puts simply: “If VG is to keep and strengthen our No. 1 position as Norway’s largest online news site, we need to succeed with video.”

As it strategizes, VG also makes interesting use of old-fashioned linear TV. VGTV runs several channels on cable and satellite and gets payments from companies for carriage. Solberg is quite clear that Oslo’s two major TV news providers — commercial TV 2, and public broadcaster NRK — will remain the near-term linear TV choice of consumers. As strong as VG is for breaking digital news, consumers haven’t transferred that habit to old-fashioned TV. “What we learned was that, when there is big news happening, people go to VG, digitally, and to established TV channels. That didn’t turn out — that people would also watch us on linear TV,” says Solberg.

How likely is that to change? “I don’t think that’s possible to change,” acknowledges Solberg. “We have said from the very beginning with the linear TV channel, that everything we do has to gain us digitally. Our core strategy is digital.”

And that strategy includes ad revenue that is now “broadcast,” even if current VGTV revenues largely are bought out of the digital bucket.

“Traditional TV is still very strong in Norway,” says Solberg. “Norwegians like TV and watch almost three hours a day on linear TV. I think it’s just a matter of time before this shift [to digital video] in consumption will pay off.”

Put it all together and linear TV is a means to VG’s digital end. Those cable and satellite distribution payments represent the majority of linear TV revenue, with advertising a secondary source there.

After testing news on linear TV, VGTV now runs largely documentaries on the channel around the clock. “It’s about six to eight documentaries a day,” says Solberg. “Some news — a news loop and a sports loop.”

Intriguingly, it is these same documentaries — about 20 were produced last year — that have now moved behind a digital paywall. Documentaries such as “Stuck,” a series on human trafficking, used to be largely free via the web; now they support that significant digital subscription growth. And yet they remain free on VGTV’s linear channel. Consumer confusion? Not really — just a different distribution channel.

As VG and Schibsted’s other dailies in Norway and Stockholm work through the possible delivery channels of 2020, they have to deal with the economics of 2017. How well is that big overall strategy going — the establishment of VG, a brand established out of the ashes of World War II, as a digital brand of today and tomorrow.

In 2017’s first quarter, digital revenues — including VGTV’s — totaled 48 percent of all VG income. That’s close to a real crossover, and the highest percentage of any daily-based operation of which I’ve heard.

The typical likes-to-dislikes ratio for a Vox video is 10:1, but between 2 to 3 p.m. on Thursday, the producer of the video Mac Schneider noticed the likes to dislikes ratio on the Ramzan Kadyrov video had tipped to 1:1 (as of noon on Friday, the video had 8,453 likes and 4,703 dislikes), Vox’s executive producer Joe Posner told me in an email explaining the timeline. Around this time, there was a spike in traffic to the video from Russia.

watch the video that traffic from russia is bulk-spamming dislikes and trying to get taken down: https://t.co/go7HAVGMgC pic.twitter.com/9Qg91hQFgm

— joe posner (@joeposner) May 26, 2017

Vox also received a privacy complaint via YouTube’s reporting mechanism — the first time it had ever received this type of complaint in its three years of publishing video, according to Posner. Between 2 to 6 p.m., Vox received 230 more similar complaints.

I reached out to YouTube with some questions — as did the Vox team — but haven’t yet heard back on what exactly is going on. The evidence points to a coordinated effort, whether a botnet or humans or a mix.

Exploiting social media’s reporting tools to get a post taken down is a familiar strategy. The Guardian reported in 2015 how paid trolls, for instance, have been deployed to flood social media or comments sections of Western media with pro-Putin and pro-Kremlin comments. Bloggers critical of the government have been targeted with reports of policy violations, and social networks like Facebook haven’t come up with a good way to distinguish between political attacks or real violation reports.

It’s a opportunity that the University of California, Berkeley, hopes to take advantage of. In 2015, the Investigative Reporting Program at the University’s Graduate School of Journalism formed Investigative Reporting Productions (IRP), a nonprofit production company to develop original, one-off journalistic documentaries and docuseries. In its latest move, the organization, which was formally recognized by the university earlier this month, inked its first big distribution deal with Amazon, which said it wanted “first look” rights (meaning that it gets to see new ideas before any other company) to the projects coming out of the organization. It was a big first for Amazon, which hadn’t previously partnered with a news organization in such a capacity.

The deal is a significant one, both for the university and its journalism school, because it will change in a significant way how the program produces, funds, and distributes its projects, explained John Temple, managing editor of the Investigative Reporting Program. “For the first time since the serious decline in journalism’s economic model, there is a commercial market for reliable nonfiction production. That’s a result of the internet and streaming video and these companies are paying well and interested in high quality. Why not take advantage of that?”

While public universities are a good place to learn how to produce documentaries, the slow churn of their bureaucracies often make them ill-suited to meet the requirements of typical video production, which demands speed and flexibility. This is true, in particular, with staffing. Unless the program has a consistent stream of new projects, money constraints mean that journalism programs aren’t able to hire camera operators and editors full-time.

These constraints are why, historically, these kinds of longform video projects were outsourced to private companies, which handed the bulk of the production. That solution, however, created its own problem in that the universities weren’t able to retain rights to the material produced by third parties — and hence missed out on any potential revenue. IRP and the Amazon deal help solve both of those challenges, letting the journalism program more easily produce new work while the university retains intellectual property rights.

IRP is the brainchild of Lowell Bergman, a veteran investigative journalist whose work with ABC News, 60 Minutes, The New York Times, and Frontline has earned him a Pulitzer, multiple Emmys, and many other awards (his investigation of the tobacco industry also inspired the 1999 film The Insider, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe). At UC Berkeley (where he’s the Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Reporting), Bergman wears a lot of hats: beyond teaching investigative reporting, he also helps with fundraising and connecting student projects with television programs looking to air them.

Bergman, who is 71 and has run the Investigative Reporting Program at Berkeley since 2006, said that IRP was formed to institutionalize the production process and develop a more sustainable model for journalism production by, in part, diversifying revenue streams (until now, most of the journalism program’s funding has come from donations). “These are very tumultuous times for journalism. The current administration has been talking about eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is a major funder of the kind of work we do,” Bergman said. “Any way that we can build a more diverse revenue stream can only make us healthier and more editorially independent.”

Amazon’s interest is understandable, given how aggressively it and other other streaming service companies have inked production and distribution over the past few years (Amazon Studios was one of the top buyers at Sundance this year). Amazon’s interest isn’t limited to video, either. Project ideas from IRP could also become podcast series on Audible, Amazon’s audio platform, which has been building out a stable of original content. With the Amazon deal also comes the promise of distribution beyond the U.S. market. The deal also opens up IRP to work with outside groups looking to turn reporting ideas into documentary production.

IRP has already started to present project ideas to Amazon. Bergman wouldn’t go into specifics about what’s in the works, but he said that, broadly, the company is focused on issues related to topics in juvenile justice, climate change, and politics. Bergman’s projects such as the Frontline documentaries “Rape in the Fields” and “Rape on the Night Shift,” which investigated labor trafficking and sexual abuse of migrant workers, also offer hints of the direction the company could go. “Amazon is interested in almost everything,” said Bergman, who added that IRP is able to pitch elsewhere any projects that Amazon doesn’t think would be a good fit for its service. In this new world of video production and distribution “there are all kinds of places we can go,” Temple said.

Vox, meanwhile, has built up substantial reservoir of knowledge when it comes to Internet videos that focus on complex or difficult topics, and it’s begun to look at new ways to partner with other outlets to spread the impact and reach of its video coverage.

On Monday, the two organizations announced that they’re teaming up to hire a joint video producer on a year-long appointment (because of the limited-time nature of the job, they’re calling it a fellowship) who will work with Vox’s video team to create videos based on ProPublica’s reporting.

“[The person who’s hired] will have the ability to learn from the Vox video team’s culture and be a part of the editorial processes that make those videos so successful,” Vox general manager Andrew Golis said of the Vox video team. “By going over to ProPublica on a regular basis and being in the stream of their reporting, they’ll be able to look around and see opportunities for visual stories — things that will naturally lend themselves to the map-first, data-viz-first, or character-and-scene-first visual storytelling that Vox does.”

The Vox/ProPublica Video Fellow will be based in the Vox newsroom; the position will be financed by ProPublica. The deadline to apply is May 31.

ProPublica regularly collaborates with other news organizations. It’s worked with Vox previously on a number of occasions, including on a video about how the Drug Enforcement Administration invented “narco-terrorism.”

Since the election of Donald Trump, ProPublica has been flooded with donations, and one of the areas it’s investing in is video. In addition to the joint fellow with Vox, ProPublica is also hiring a video producer to lead efforts to expand in the medium. The role ProPublica is hiring for is a contract position that runs through 2018, and Umansky said ProPublica is still figuring out how exactly its video plans will take shape, though it hopes the partnership with Vox will help inform them.

“We want to do the kind of videos that Vox has specialized in,” Umansky said.

On YouTube, Vox has racked 2.2 million subscribers and more than 450 million total video views — an increase from 753,000 subscribers and 146.7 million views just a year ago.

Golis said Vox’s 20-person video team regularly comes up with its own story ideas to pursue, but it’s also thinking about new ways it can work with other organizations. Last year, for instance, Vox teamed up with the 99 Percent Invisible podcast to produce a video that corresponded to an episode of the show.

“These types of collaborations are a comfortable, natural thing for our team to do,” Golis said.

ProPublica is also doing more kinds of collaborations. In March, it partnered with The New York Times Magazine to hire Pamela Colloff as a senior reporter at ProPublica and a writer-at-large at the Times Magazine.

“Just like all of our story partnerships are each their own delicate flower, we do things opportunistically when it makes sense,” Umansky said. “This thing very much makes sense.”

The Post is looking for a senior producer with “experience producing and writing comedy and will hire and manage a team of high-performing producers, writers and directors with a proven ability to deliver tightly produced, short, comedic segments on news-driven deadlines,” along with a producer/writer, director/writer, and videographer on the same project, which falls under the Post’s opinion section.

“In the Opinions space, we see an opportunity to experiment with scripted programming that will bring to life key issues in smart, humorous ways,” according to a posting for an executive producer job. “We fully understand the difficulty of success in this area and we seek candidates who are comfortable trying new things and then iterating on them.” (Way back in 2009 — a thousand years ago in web video terms — a Post satirical video show led by Dana Milbank and Chris Cilizza was killed after bad reviews and criticism.)

The scripted humor initiative is only part of the Post’s efforts as it looks to grow its presence in video, especially on over-the-top platforms like the Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. The paper currently has about 40 newsroom staffers working on video, and the new hires will bring that total to 70 plus another 10 or so on the product and development side, Micah Gelman, the Post’s director of editorial video, told me. The Post also plans to add 10 more video positions across 2018 and 2019, when it hopes its focus will be turning toward producing more long-form documentaries.

Gelman said the Post’s overall goal is to produce more video coverage that stands alone from its more traditional text reporting. “We are creating content that stands alone, that people come to and say: ‘Let’s see what The Washington Post has today in video. It’s reimagining what Washington Post journalism looks like in the future. We are placing some bets. We understand that we need to be on a lot of platforms, from Facebook to YouTube to over-the-top, and we need to deliver the type of content to those devices that people are expecting. It’s a very different experience clicking on a video in an article while you’re standing in line for coffee in the morning, versus sitting on the couch and firing up your Apple TV or Fire TV in the evening.”

The video hires come as the Post is growing its staff across the newsroom. Ken Doctor reported last month that the Post, which says it is profitable, is adding 60 jobs to its newsroom this year, an increase of 8 percent.

Gelman said that video unit itself is also profitable, and strong advertiser demand is helping fuel the growth in the video department. He also said that Post owner (and Amazon founder) Jeff Bezos is encouraging the paper to experiment with new video ad formats including shorter 5- to 7-second preroll ads, midroll ads, and video sponsorships.

“Jeff Bezos is really pushing us to aggressively iterate on the ad experience,” Gelman said. “I don’t think anyone is a fan of preroll as a user experience and he has been aggressively pushing us to test new formats, shorter formats, and video placement.”

Gelman said part of this round of hiring is aimed at creating video better able to stand on its own and more differentiated from breaking news coverage.

“We’ve been so focused on the news of the day and breaking news and doing things straight that we really haven’t been able to spend the time we want or to put the people behind it,” Gelman said of the humor strategy. “I think this is a really good opportunity for us to get that genre started. We’ll do it with Opinions, the editorial side, because we think a lot of it will fall into their wheelhouse.”

The Post currently has a staffer working half-time on video content for its opinion desk, and it plans to grow that section’s video staff to four full-timers. The expansion is happening across desks, Gelman said. The foreign desk, for instance, currently has one video staffer, but new hires will bring the total to four.

Video has long been a priority for the Post, with mixed results. In 2013, it launched PostTV, which was heavy on live political coverage and show-based programming; the paper’s president at the time, Steve Hills, said it had “the chance, over time, to be the ESPN of politics.” But the live-centric approach didn’t gain traction, and the effort ultimately fizzled out. In 2015, Gelman told the Lab’s Shan Wang that the Post was moving away from television-style “appointment viewing.” (Other newspapers and digital news orgs such as The Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal also bet on live video around the same time, and they’ve also largely moved away from those formats — at least other than Facebook Live.)

Gelman reiterated to me that the Post isn’t looking to turn into a TV station even as it moves into over the top platforms. Instead, the Post is trying to condition its audience that the Post’s videos are available across devices. The Post will continue to also adapt videos for different formats — for instance, optimizing for viewing on social platforms by adding subtitles.

“We’re certainly not creating the point with television where we expect people to tune in at a certain time or in a certain place, but we are certainly creating the habit that The Washington Post will have content — whether it’s short-form news clips or long-form documentary or everything in between — that is a premium experience across all of these devices.”

Recode on Tuesday reported that Facebook planned to de-emphasize its Facebook Live efforts by ending subsidies to publishers. Instead, it reported, that Facebook is encouraging outlets to create longer, high-quality video for the platform that could possibly compete with Netflix.

Even as the Post bets on video, multiple studies have found that users aren’t as interested in news video as publisher investments might suggest. The analytics firm Parse.ly last week released a report that found video posts on sites in its network received 30 percent less engaged time than the average post. Similarly, a report last year by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism analyzed Chartbeat data from 30 outlets across four countries. That study found that while 6.5 percent of news site webpages had video, users spent just 2.5 percent of average visit time on pages that had video and “97.5 percent of time is still spent with text.”

“So far, the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand,” Antonis Kalogeropoulos, one of the report’s authors, said in a statement at the time.

Still, the Post said its video views increased 139 percent last year — though it didn’t provide the specific number of views — and Gelman said that many users come to newspaper sites with the expectation that they’re going to read an article, not watch a video. As a result, he said it’s “a conversion process of getting acclimated and conditioned to watch video.”

“Certainly, if you stack news video against a sitcom or longform, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to rank as well. I think, generally, a lot of news organizations have not done as well putting a highly relevant video into the story. I think some of our peers are more likely to just play any video into a story that’s somewhat tangentially related because they have the option of getting a clip. We’re not doing any automated video, we’re not doing programmatic decisions of what videos go into stories…these are all thoughtful editors making the decisions.”

Parse.ly examined the performance of four types of posts within its network of 700 sites: long-form, short-form, video, and slideshows. Video posts received 30 percent less engaged time than the average post, the study found. (Parse.ly defines “engaged time” as being “actively engaged with content — when [users] not only have a page open, but they have also recently interacted with it [via scrolling or clicking, for example]. Visitors are also considered actively engaged if they are watching a video.”)

The report suggested a few reasons for why engagement with videos are lower:

— Auto-play: Visitors expecting to read a text article might click the back button when a video starts playing on the page (possibly creating disruptive noise in a quiet environment).
— Slow load: Video players can take a long time to load, especially on mobile devices. This delay may cause visitors to bounce.
— Incomplete integration: It is possible that sites in this study have an incomplete Parse.ly integration, making their engaged time less accurate for posts with video. While we don’t think this is the case, we always encourage clients to ensure their integration is complete when testing a variety of formats.

When it comes to video, other studies have also suggested that the supply of news video outpaces consumer demand.

Here’s what my colleague Laura Hazard Owen wrote last June about a report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University:

Analyzing Chartbeat data from 30 news outlets across the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Italy (17 of the outlets were American, nine were broadcasters), the researchers found that the sites’ users spent “only around 2.5 percent of average visit time” on pages that included videos, and “97.5 percent of time is still spent with text.” That 2.5 percent of time spent was even lower than the total share of pages that have videos (6.5 percent).

We keep hearing about the boom in online video, so what’s going on? To be clear, the report’s authors distinguish between “news video” hosted on publishers’ own sites and video on social networks or centered around “softer news and lifestyle content (or premium drama and sports on demand)” rather than hard news. They researchers urge caution in conflating the fast growth of online video in general with the growth of, specifically, hard news video.

“So far, the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand,” Antonis Kalogeropoulos, one of the report’s authors, said in a statement.

Long-form articles, meanwhile, which the report defines as stories that are more than 1,000 words, have an average engaged time of 1.8 times higher than normal.

“Long-form content drives engagement and appears to be a good source of growth. It attracts new readers to online media sites via Google and keeps them engaged nearly twice as long as normal articles,” Parse.ly said.

The full report is available here. You’ll need to enter an email address to read it.

In the fall, after internally testing the vertical video in the app, BBC News unveiled a reboot of its main mobile app. Even though just a fraction of the BBC’s audience uses the app, 48 percent of BBC News’ digital video is viewed there, and about a quarter of viewers watch more than five clips weekly. The broadcaster wanted to take steps to make those videos more mobile-friendly and move beyond just repackaging TV stories.

There are now two modules that play vertical video within the BBC app. “Videos of the Day” is a Snapchat-like playlist of stories that users can swipe through; Monday’s edition covered everything from Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globes to a pair of red pandas playing in the snow. And in December, the BBC debuted the more feature-oriented BBC Stories.

It was occasionally tough to get editorial teams on board, said mobile product manager James Metcalfe, since they’d be responsible for creating new types of video content; at the time of the internal tests, “a majority of the pieces that we were producing were still landscape video.” But “from that internal beta, [we saw] that vertical was way better. The switch clicked that we need to produce more packages of content that are in this format.”

“Telling a story in this format makes it more personal,” said O’Connor. “There’s a FaceTime-like quality to the way it frames people…it [allows us to] connect to a story in a different way while appealing to different audiences.”

The BBC’s vertical video segments are typically 90 seconds or less, and they’re subtitled so viewers can watch without sound. Many of the pieces shared directly on Facebook or other social platforms. The BBC is also developing vertical video ads.

In previous projects, the digital team was primarily building a product for a pre-determined editorial product. But with the vertical video initiative, the digital staffers also played a hand in determining what the editorial coverage would look like, said head of product Alex Watson.

“This is probably one of our first projects where UX, product, and technology have played an intimate part in shaping the content proposition,” he said.

The BBC launched a public beta in July and tweaked the product as it received feedback from testers. For example, users tended to watch several videos at a time, so the team made sure it was easy to swipe between them.

“Younger audiences, women in particular, are drawn to this approach that is more visual and video,” said O’Connor. “You get audiences telling you that it’s almost a sit-back kind of experience. If people do want to dig deeper, we give them an onward journey, but we’re not going to give you 500 onward journeys. We’re trying to limit that overwhelming feeling of choice that is in the core app experience.”

The BBC wouldn’t share specific viewership figures, but Metcalfe said the addition of vertical video has been well received.

While the addition of vertical video might have seemed seamless to app users, the BBC’s content production system is still primarily designed for television and horizontal output. Often, horizontal videos have to be repurposed for the vertical player.

The app launch was “a good example of compromising to get to market and prove” that vertical video can work,” Watson said. “As always, with workflow, there’s this chicken-and-egg situation: People don’t want to change if it’s not real and hitting the front end and being seen by the audience — but of course, if you really want to radically change, you need to change the content before the audience sees it.”

Watson is hopeful that BBC News’ adoption of vertical video will encourage other areas of the BBC to experiment with it.

“Vertical for drama has not happened yet,” Watson said. “But it probably will. What’s nice now that we’ve done it is that there will be a conversation in the wider BBC about vertical video. Certainly, in sport, you’ll start to see it soon.”