For most of the last decade, “pivot to video” was a cautionary tale in newsrooms — a reminder of the mid-2010s scramble to chase Facebook’s video algorithm, which collapsed almost as fast as it began. Today’s vertical video moment looks much different.
Rather than abandoning text for video, publishers from The New York Times to a two-year-old startup newsroom in rural Nevada are treating vertical video as a parallel channel — one built to meet readers where their habits have already shifted. The audience shift behind that strategy is hard to ignore: 43% of U.S. adults under 30 now regularly get news from TikTok, according to Pew Research Center, up from just 9% in 2020. But leaning too heavily on someone else’s platform carries its own risk, which is exactly why so many publishers are now trying to build a version of that experience they actually own.
From social experiment to owned real estate
The shift started, as most format changes do, on someone else’s platform. Publishers tested vertical clips on TikTok and Instagram and watched the engagement numbers climb. “Then they asked: why hand over all of that attention to a platform you don’t control?” said Chris Chang, senior multimedia journalist and social media lead at The National News Desk, a digital news program from the Sinclair Broadcast Group that reaches over 80 million viewers each month nationwide.
Chang has spent more than a decade at the intersection of journalism and multimedia storytelling. He has led social video production for national and international media outlets including The Washington Post, PBS, and USA TODAY — where, under his leadership, the network’s TikTok account grew to more than 4 million followers, while its site sees a monthly visit of over 1 million.
According to Chang, a successful digital video strategy for media outlets depends on relentless attention to retention and audience engagement, not just view counts. That philosophy shows up in the wave of in-app “watch” tabs that The New York Times, CNN, and Long Island’s Newsday have all launched over the past two years. Execution varies by outlet: the Times’ Watch tab autoplays as soon as it opens and is curated entirely by editors — no algorithm, no personalization, at least not yet.
The results at these outlets are starting to come into focus. The Times says video consumption on its platform has doubled over the past year as it now produces roughly 75 hours of video a month, feeding a daily selection of about 20 short vertical clips pulled from News, Opinion, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic. CNN went further, moving short-form video out of a buried “Watch” tab in November 2025 and onto the home screen itself as a swipeable “Shorts” feed, explicitly modeled on the interaction patterns of TikTok and Instagram Reels.
As a longtime judge and mediator for prestigious industry awards, including the Emmys and the Deadline Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Chang has watched this shift unfold from the inside. “What unites these publishers is a deliberate choice to leave out the mechanics of social media — no likes, no ranking algorithm deciding what a reader sees next,” he said. “A newsroom’s job is still to inform.”
News Consumption on TikTok (Adult 26-40)
The audience isn’t who you’d assume
One assumption keeps getting knocked down by the people building these programs: that vertical video is strictly a young-audience play. The Economist’s video team says older subscribers have become some of its heaviest viewers — anecdotally, more parents are forwarding Reels to their kids than the other way around.
Chang has seen the same pattern play out well beyond traditional newsrooms. While working as a consultant and multimedia producer for UC Berkeley Strategic Communications, he pushed back on the organization’s academic-centric framing of its own audience, noting that vertical video consumption across its social platforms more than tripled in a single year. He helped revamp the university’s communications strategy, including launching a social-first educational series like Born At UC Berkeley and 101 in 101s — short-form explainers that have since drawn millions of views and earned the team several awards from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for its innovative approaches to educational communication.
The broader appeal matters for a specific business reason: retention. Chang points to his time with The Washington Post’s video team, which he argues helped kick off the entire vertical video revolution that later spread across the industry. He both directed video production and appeared on camera, covering a wide range of topics — geopolitics, economics, culture — with the goal of engaging directly with the Post’s audience and reaching the viewers most likely to stick around. That approach shaped how social videos got made at the Post: the Instagram account Chang operated, now with over 7.5 million followers, went on to win the 2024 Webby Award for Best Social Account in News & Politics.
Getting reporters on camera
Even at organizations with dedicated video staff, there’s a recurring tension over how to present the best reporting on camera. Local news outlets like The Minnesota Star Tribune regularly loop reporters into video coverage, particularly for breaking news, while The Nevada Independent has gone further, running informal coaching sessions on lighting, delivery, and pacing so reporters can start thinking like producers.
Chang faced a version of this challenge during the 2024 general election cycle, when he directed and coordinated a team of video and text journalists across the Great Lakes region for USA TODAY. His advice for newsrooms: don’t force it across the board. Identify the handful of people who are already curious about video, give them room to experiment, and make sure production support is ready to deploy when news breaks. By collaborating with reporters and video journalists across eight states, his team produced over 80 videos across the network’s digital and OTT channels, garnering over 5 million views during election week. One video alone — a two-minute on-camera vertical with hand-drawn animation explaining which party would control Congress — drew more than 800,000 views within 24 hours of the polls closing, a result that established momentum for the team’s coverage through the post-election cycle.
Chris Chang while covering the 2024 general elections
What’s actually different this time
The comparison between the current industry trend and the 2010s “pivot to video” is unavoidable, but the people doing this work argue the two moments aren’t really alike. That earlier pivot meant abandoning text in favor of a format optimized for someone else’s ad business, and it collapsed once the platform’s incentives changed. This one looks more like addition than substitution: publishers are keeping their reporting intact and building a new distribution layer next to it, one they control, aimed at an audience that has already decided vertical video is how it wants to consume the news.
There’s also a monetization case that didn’t exist a decade ago. The Times says its Watch tab will open to advertisers through a beta test for vertical video advertising in early 2026, and Reuters Institute’s latest industry survey of news executives found that video networks are the single biggest area where publishers plan to increase effort in 2026 — YouTube and TikTok topped the list, while executives said they plan to pull back on X, Facebook, and traditional search optimization.
But as newsroom leaders across the industry tell it, the point was never to replace journalism with video. “It’s to make sure the journalism actually reaches people where they already are,” Chang said.
Chris Chang in Guatemala City producing his award-winning project: Rising Above the Landfill
