How The Washington Post is pivoting its video strategy

On Thursday, the publisher announced it’s ditching the “PostTV” moniker for its in-house video unit in favour of “Washington Post Video.” The name change embodies the publisher’s shift away from television-style and long-form narrative content toward more digitally native video formats and structures.

“We have a real opportunity to experiment, to break off from the conventions of traditional television into [digital] video storytelling,” said Micah Gelman, who joined The Post in April as director of video.

That storytelling will include shorter-form original videos, aggregated pieces, news explainers and content built around The Post’s popular franchises like The Fix and Wonkblog. It will also include content created specifically for social platforms.

“In the past, we produced one video and expected that video to work in every place it went. It doesn’t,” Gelman said. “Viewing habits on Facebook are different than viewing habits on Snapchat.”

Currently, Facebook is leading The Post’s video views with 22.8m in July, according to data from Tubular Labs. The Post’s website followed with 1.9m views, according to comScore. YouTube accounted for 1.2m views. The Post said overall its video starts are up 73 per cent year-over-year.

Read the full article here

Source: Digiday

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