Local news social media video: own the explainer beat

Every local story has a second story attached to it that almost nobody publishes: what it means for the person watching.

The council approved an amendment to the parking scheme is the filed story. Your street changes on the fourteenth, and here is what to do about the permit you already have, is the video. Same reporting, different job.

That second job is unstaffed nearly everywhere, and the reason is structural rather than editorial. A national desk cannot do it for four hundred towns. An aggregator cannot do it at all, because the answer requires knowing which street and which scheme. The work does not scale, which is precisely why the competition for it is close to zero.

It is also the cheapest video a local title can make, because the expensive part is already paid for. A reporter who filed the story in the morning can explain it out loud in the afternoon without opening a single new file. The video is a second delivery of work that already exists.

One caution before the shapes. An explainer is not a summary. Nobody watches a video that restates a headline. The value is the translation into a decision: what changes, when, and what a resident does about it.

Decide these once and the desk stops having the what-do-we-post conversation for the rest of the year. An audience also learns what to expect from you, which is half of why they come back.

The rhythm only works if the video is a byproduct of reporting rather than a second job bolted onto it. That single distinction decides whether the desk lasts.

The shape of the day that survives: one fixed slot, decided in the morning meeting, written in about ten minutes from a story already filed, recorded in one block, posted at the same time every day. The fixed time matters more than the number does, because an audience that knows when you arrive comes looking.

One a day is the honest ceiling for two people who also do other things. Three a week is the safe start, and a desk that hits three a week for a quarter has earned the right to argue about five.

Batch the recording rather than the writing. Writing has to happen close to the story. Recording does not, so two or three reads back to back on a Monday and a Wednesday costs far less than five separate setups.

Keep two evergreen explainers in the bank for the week somebody is ill. How the council actually works, or what the local planning process does with an objection, sits fine for months and rescues a Thursday.

A local audience replies with facts. They correct a street name, they add the bit the council left out, and they tell you what happened at the meeting you could not staff. On a national account the comment section is noise. On a local one it is a tip line that files itself.

That has a cost nobody puts in the staffing plan. Somebody has to read it, and the honest number is around twenty minutes twice a day, on the desk rather than farmed out, because the reporter who answers is the reporter people start sending things to.

Three rules keep it survivable. Correct once, publicly, and stop. Never argue with anyone twice. If an argument turns out to be a good question that plenty of people share, do not win it in the replies, make it tomorrow's video and say where it came from.

The measurement follows from this too. Saves and shares tell you the explainer worked, because a person saving a video about a permit deadline intends to use it. Comments naming actual streets tell you the reach is local rather than accidental. Follower count tells you almost nothing at this scale and is the number most likely to be quoted in a board meeting.

The failure is almost never ideas. A local desk has more explainers than it can film in a decade. The failure is the evening after the recording.

Price that step before promising a daily slot. Captions timed by hand, a vertical composition, a name checked, an export: thirty to forty minutes a video for somebody competent. Five a week is a working day, taken from a desk that had no spare working day to begin with.

The floor costs nothing and it is genuinely fine at three posts a week: record the take, use the caption tools built into the posting apps, post it. Do not buy anything until the habit has survived a month.

Once the daily slot is real, the edit is the whole constraint, and that is the one job Cutroom does. One spoken take of up to 3 minutes goes in and a finished 9:16 MP4 comes back in about a minute: every word transcribed, a hook drafted, footage placed on the exact words that need showing, captions timed in one of six styles, silence and filler trimmed. It is directed by reading the transcript and pointing at words, so a producer can check a piece as text before it goes out and fix a misspelled street name there rather than in a timeline. The limits, stated first: it takes a take recorded on purpose rather than clipping a long recording, and every export is a vertical MP4 with the captions burned in.

A batch is 100 credits and export adds 20 credits per finished minute, so a thirty second explainer runs about 110 credits and a full minute runs 120. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 finished thirty second videos, nothing on the picture at all, cancel in one click.