Vertical video for newsrooms: the reporter is the format

Scroll a vertical feed for two minutes and count how many of the videos that held you opened on a person's face. Then count how many opened on a lower third over drone footage.

A newsroom's instinct runs the other way. The broadcast package puts pictures first and the reporter last, because that is what a rundown rewards. On a phone the order is backwards: the picture arrives before anyone has been given a reason to watch it, and the thumb moves.

The correction is small and it is not a matter of taste. Open on the reporter, in frame, saying what happened. Pictures come in behind the sentences that need showing, not in front of them.

There is a second reason and it belongs to the newsroom rather than to the platform. A byline is an asset the title already paid for. Readers who trust a masthead mostly trust particular people inside it, and vertical video is the only distribution channel where that transfer happens directly, face to face, at the scale of a feed.

Which reporter appears matters more than the lighting does. The person who worked the story can answer the follow-up in the comments an hour later. A presenter reading their copy cannot, and the audience works out the difference faster than anyone in the building expects.

A vertical news video is not competing with your evening package. It is competing with the other version of the same story in the same feed, which is usually a screenshot of somebody else's headline with an outraged caption over it.

So the bar is two questions. Is this recognisably reported, and is it here while the story is still moving. Colour grading appears in neither question.

Newsrooms already work this way everywhere else. Nobody grades a live two-way or relights a radio hit. A vertical update is the same object with a phone instead of a satellite truck, and treating it as a small documentary is how a desk ends up publishing yesterday's news beautifully.

The practical version: decide the finished length before recording, do it in one take, and post while the story is live. A second take costs ninety seconds. A fourth take costs the news cycle.

The trade is real and it should be agreed out loud rather than discovered. You will publish videos with an unlovely background and a stumble in the third sentence. Unless somebody senior says once, in the room, that this is the agreed standard for the vertical desk, the first person to see a rough cut will quietly reintroduce a three-hour edit and the desk will be back to two posts a week by March.

Speed is not the strongest thing a newsroom can put in a vertical feed. The working is.

Nearly every other video on the same subject is unsourced. A reporter who says where a figure came from, who separates what is confirmed from what is not yet, and who names the document, is doing something the feed cannot fake at any budget.

Three sentences carry most of it. Here is what we know. Here is how we know it. Here is what we do not know yet. That last sentence is the one that reads as strength rather than weakness, and it is the one most desks cut for time.

Corrections belong in the feed too, and they belong on camera. A correction posted as a text card reads as damage control. The same reporter saying we had that figure wrong yesterday, here is the right one, here is where it came from, is close to the most credible thing a title can publish, and it costs one minute of somebody's afternoon.

This also settles the argument about comment sections. When the sourcing is inside the video, the comments argue with the story. When it is not, they argue about whether you made it up, and that is a conversation nobody wins.

The format has a shape and plenty of good journalism does not fit it. Knowing which is which is what stops a vertical desk from producing the thing everyone scrolls past.

Everything above ignores the constraint that actually decides whether a vertical desk survives its first quarter: somebody has to cut the video.

Count that honestly before promising a daily slot. Captions timed by hand, a vertical composition rather than a crop, a check on the spelling of a surname, an export. Forty minutes is a fair figure for a careful editor, and the desk that budgeted ten is the desk that goes quiet in week six while everybody blames the appetite of the audience.

The floor costs nothing and is a legitimate answer for a while: post the take as recorded, using the caption tools built into the posting apps. If the desk publishes twice a week, stay on the floor and spend the argument somewhere else.

Above roughly one a day, the edit becomes the entire job. Cutroom exists for that step and nothing else: one spoken take of up to 3 minutes goes in, and a finished 9:16 MP4 comes back in about a minute, with every word transcribed, the hook drafted, footage placed on the exact words that need showing, captions timed and styled, and silence and filler trimmed. You direct it by reading the transcript and pointing at words, never a timeline, which for a newsroom doubles as the standards read: a producer checks the piece as text before it leaves the building and fixes a misheard name in the transcript rather than chasing it down a track. Say the limit out loud first, though. It does not clip a two-hour broadcast or hunt a long recording for moments. The input is a take somebody recorded on purpose, and exports are vertical MP4 only, with no subtitle files to download.

A batch is 100 credits and export adds 20 credits per finished minute, so a thirty second read is about 110 credits and a full minute is 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.