Right now, when the effort that people put into informing others has found its best footprint in the digital space, one of its best tools, the smartphone, will prevail during 2018 as the most desired option to achieve wider audiences.
We’ve already seen how the consumption of news and other content has grown, including advertisements, through mobile phones, which has forced newspapers or their digital counterparts to look for innovative ways to put all their eggs in this one basket.
This way, digital journals’ employees have begun to adapt their content to the vertical platform of the smartphone, knowing that the majority of today’s users search for information mainly off their mobile phones, and not so much from tablets, laptops or PCs.
Avid for information, mobile users interact more than 50 times a day with their devices to feel updated, and this recurrence forces the digital journals to renew their content almost at the same frenetic pace that those readers demand it.
Since we live in a world in which the time spent reading news or watching videos is quite short for most of us, the news outlets have to adapt to this ephemeral meta, concise and brief formats that allow us to synthesize in a few words what actually happens.
But since there’s a too obvious preference for the audiovisual, call video or narrated graphics with voice, the media predicts that in 2018 they’ll have to bet and rely on the “story told in a minute” thought, and for that they’re already designing templates of video stories for the people who want to inform themselves quickly this way.
The video strategy that, in this respect, is being adopted by the group of Norwegian newspapers Schibsted and the Verdens Gang news agency (VG), is to create a vertical structure, with fast navigation, to tell good stories on video in a compressed format.
“For each reader, on their phone, we will offer an individual front page in our media, where we are going to put out stories that people are willing to pay for. Most of the users reach our sites through a mobile phone, and the media that do not adapt to this fact will certainly lose control of distribution. You have to rethink journalism so that it becomes personal for the user” said Torry Pedersen, the editorial director of the Schibsted group.
According to Pedersen, the young people of today who are users of the digital sites and networks want to get to know enough to be part of the interactive communication with the media, but they have issues reading the news and finding them on mobile phones.
Therefore, the challenge for everyone from now on is to learn to efficiently tell stories on mobile for people who want to get quickly informed. And if this video story can be told in a under minute, well, much better.
-Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 