Future of TV Briefing: Inside the Wall Street Journal’s video-based approach to this year’s election coverage

As The Wall Street Journal crafted its coverage strategy for this year’s U.S. presidential election, video played a key role.

“If we look at the election broadly, the election reporting strategy is: What does the audience need? And often the audience needs to see things and the audience needs to hear things. The audience needs to watch things,” said Charles Forelle, deputy editor of the WSJ.

“Video is an increasingly important storytelling tool as we reach new audiences who have different expectations of us: Younger generations of news consumers are more likely to want to watch the news,” Taneth Evans, head of digital at WSJ, said in an email. Email.

Case in point: The newspaper publisher released a series on its YouTube channel this year called “State of the Stat,” which breaks down a single data point and breaks it down through visuals that include motion graphics, interviews with WSJ reporters and outside experts and clips from it include the presidential campaigns.

“We take a number and explain what that number says about the election as a whole. And we did it for YouTube first, but we brought it to our own platform and we’re versioning it elsewhere,” said Amanda Wills, head of video at WSJ.

In other words, the Journal’s 65-person global video team is constantly busy. While that team includes people in technical roles, “the vast majority of them are video journalists or senior producers or executive producers in some capacity,” Wills said. And although that team reduced its headcount by laying off some employees after Google decided not to renew its “Journalists as Creators” program that funded the Journal, the size of the team is “absolutely not shrinking,” said she.

The video footprint is also not there. YouTube is the news channel’s largest video platform, with 5.7 million subscribers to its main channel. This year, through October 21, an average of 79,000 new subscribers are being added per month, according to data from Tubular Labs. But his TikTok account has also grown. The Journal now counts 524,300 followers on the short-video platform and has added an average of 21,500 new followers per month this year, according to data from Tubular Labs.

The growth of WSJ’s short-form video presence comes with a new component of the publisher’s election coverage strategy: quick visual investigations.

Wills is initially assembling a dedicated team of about five people who will work with the publication’s larger investigative team to combat election-related misinformation that is likely to spread through video platforms.

“I have a whole team basically on standby to do quick visual exams and say, ‘No, what you keep seeing isn’t true,’ or ‘Everyone is talking about this moment.’ This is what happened at this polling station. Here’s what we know visually what actually happened, and here’s how we disprove it,” Wills said.

These quick visual investigations are emblematic of the type of visual journalism the WSJ audience seeks more broadly.

A key metric the publication tracks is subscriber engagement, which includes page views as well as the level of reading of a story. When people don’t read very far into a story, “the answer in many cases is that we haven’t presented something visually that we should have presented visually, but rather we’ve asked the reader to wade through a lot of text.” he said to Trout.

Going forward, video is likely to become increasingly important to the Journal’s overall reporting strategy as well as its subscriber strategy.

“Everything we do is about quality subscription growth: we engage our current audiences to reduce churn rates and look for new audiences with a high likelihood of becoming long-term Wall Street Journal subscribers,” Evans said.

Currently, the overwhelming majority of its videos are freely available on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, so they serve to expand the reach of journalism beyond the paid subscriber base and potentially attract subscribers. But the publication has experimented with placing videos behind its subscriber paywall.

“We’re still in the very, very, very early stages and tend to do it in an experimental way on things where it’s really unique,” ​​Forelle said.

He cited a video about drone pilots fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war, with journalists traveling to a bunker in Ukraine to report on the matter and collect footage from the drones. “So we said, ‘You know what? “This is something special for subscribers.” So we’re experimenting with gated video, but we’re tiptoeing around it.” At the moment.

What we heard

“We’ve always been very low on pricing, but I think the market as a whole is finally starting to put pressure on streamers to get back to reality.”

—Agency Head on Streaming Advertising Pricing

Disney is taking back the TV viewing time crown

The latest sign of football’s importance to television viewers is the 17 percent month-over-month increase in watch time that Disney achieved in September to reclaim the watch time crown from NBCUniversal, overtaking YouTube, according to Nielsen’s Current Media Distributor Gauge report .

Disney wasn’t the only beneficiary of football. Fox and Amazon saw monthly watch time increases of 18% and 13%, respectively. That surge helped Fox overtake Warner Bros. Discovery in the rankings, while another soccer network, Paramount, pushed past Netflix.

Numbers you should know

2026: The year in which the Walt Disney Company now wants to name the CEO who will succeed Bob Iger.

282.7 million: Number of paid subscribers Netflix had at the end of the third quarter of 2024.

$180.9 million: TelevisaUnivision’s net income in the third quarter of 2024, a quarter in which streaming service ViX became profitable.

224 million pounds ($290.7 million): How much money did Sky lose in 2023?

What we covered

Saturation and cost concerns are leading brands to focus influencer spending on fewer creators:

• Economic factors are driving some brands to prioritize creators with larger followings over micro and nano influencers.
• Rising management costs for creator campaigns are a major factor driving the move.

Read more about brands’ influencer spending here.

Why retailers like Kroger and Walmart are adding streaming services to their membership programs:

• Walmart has added Paramount+ to its membership program, and Instacart and Peacock have announced a similar deal.
• Many of the packages are intended for the ad-supported tiers of streamers.

Read more about retailers’ streaming add-ons here.

How one company hopes to increase YouTuber exposure in TV commercials as CTV engagement increases:

• Studio71 developed a CTV ad product to include YouTuber videos alongside traditional 30-second ads.
• CTV represents 26% of Studio71’s viewership.

Read more about YouTubers and CTV ads here.

What we read

Adobe’s AI payments to developers:

Adobe pays bonuses to developers for stock videos and other assets they provide to the company to train its generative AI tools, with payment amounts ranging from loose change to thousands of dollars, according to Bloomberg.

LinkedIn’s video rev share program with publishers:

According to The Information, the Microsoft-owned platform’s video advertising revenue share program will generate more than $2 million each for Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal since its launch earlier this year.

The Decline of Hollywood Production:

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the number of film and television shoots in the Los Angeles area hit a new low from July to September as production declined, particularly on scripted and unscripted television shows.

Growing Pains in YouTuber Production:

According to CNBC, the controversies surrounding the filming of Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson’s reality competition show for Amazon Prime Video have shone a spotlight on broader concerns among industry members about working conditions on productions led by digital creators.

Spotify’s ad exchange:

As part of the streaming audio platform’s push into video, Spotify has opened an advertising exchange that will initially sell video advertising inventory on the platform, according to Axios.