The video content gap: why publishers need to look beyond short-form

For more than a decade, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report has been one of the news publishing industry's most trusted benchmarks for understanding how audience behaviour is changing.

This year, that picture becomes more revealing when read alongside new research from FT Strategies, created in partnership with WAN-IFRA and supported by Arc XP. The Future Newsroom Study is a landmark global benchmark based on 448 unique respondents across 86 countries that examines how newsroom leaders are adapting their priorities, capabilities and operating models in the face of commercial pressures and technological disruption.

Taken together, the two reports reveal a number of areas where audience preferences and behaviours are changing faster than many publishers’ operations can keep up with. One of the clearest examples is video content.

Video is not one single behaviour

The media shift towards video has become an accepted industry narrative: audiences have little appetite for traditional news formats, discover news on social platforms, and show a growing preference for short-form video clips.

On one hand, the Digital News Report 2026 supports this view. Social media platforms — which have historically prioritised short form video — has now overtaken both television and publisher-owned websites as the most widely used sources of news globally. As the report highlights: “Short-form video has been pushed for years by the likes of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, seemingly to great effect.”

However, there is another form of news video consumption that has emerged on the back of YouTube’s growing popularity. While platforms like TikTok remains heavily concentrated around videos under two minutes, YouTube supports a very different pattern of behaviour: extended viewing of news video.

The report highlights how, across all age groups of YouTube news consumers, 35% watch videos between six and twenty minutes long and 23% watch videos longer than twenty minutes. Even on Instagram and TikTok, 12% of news video users have watched a 20+ minute video in the last week. Those are engagement stats that any news publisher would be proud of.

In other words, it’s too simple to say that audiences, particularly younger consumers, are trading traditional journalism formats for a diet of pure short-form video. The Digital News Report shows they are consuming a mixture of short-form and longer content. However, it’s the demand for the latter that publishers may be underestimating.

Lagging newsroom investment

Findings from the Future Newsroom Study suggest that newsroom investment in video remains heavily skewed towards short-form production.

Nearly eight in ten publishers plan to prioritise short-form video this year — a strategic response to the platform shift that the Digital News Report has chronicled over the last five years. The success of video-first outlets, such as Brut and NowThis, has also led a broader set of publishers to shift emphasis towards short-form video with the goal of growing their younger audience segment.

However, just 41% of organisations surveyed said they will prioritise long-form formats over the next 12 months. That difference is more marked when looking at organisational age: legacy organisations are less likely than the survey average to prioritise longer video formats, while dotcom and digital-native organisations are more likely to channel resources into them.

That suggests legacy publishers may be responding to the first wave of the video shift — the rise of short-form discovery — while faster-moving competitors are beginning to build for the second: a more deliberate, mixed-format video strategy.

The commercial disconnect

This tension becomes more apparent when viewed through a commercial lens.

The Future Newsroom Study shows that publishers remain uncertain about where video revenue will come from. Sixty per cent of newsrooms view short-form video primarily as a reach and audience-growth tool, while only 18% see it as a meaningful revenue driver. By contrast, more than a third see long-form video as a future revenue opportunity, despite far fewer prioritising it today.

In other words, many publishers are prioritising the format they are least confident will drive direct revenue, while under-investing in the format they are more likely to associate with future growth.

That commercial conundrum may also explain why news publishers have so far neglected to equip their staff to be on camera or become a public face of the brand. The Future Newsroom Study found that just 41% had built out internal creator capabilities, and 68% don’t have ‘on-camera’ training programmes. That matters because successful video strategies increasingly depend on recognisable editorial voices, repeatable formats and talent that can build trust with audiences.

The strategic question, then, is: what should each video format do for the business?

Short-form video was initially used as an effective way to build reach and relevance off-platform. However, it has started to also become a core product offering for large news publishers who have seen it become an effective to engage users via their apps. For example, the New York Times and BBC Sport have “Watch” and “Shorts” tabs on their homepage that replicate the now-popular experience of TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. It shows that short-form video can play a role in both off-platform reach and for on-site engagement.

Long-form video, by contrast, has a stronger route to monetisation through off-platform models such as sponsorship and platform revenue-sharing. For example, The Daily Mail and Hearst have both had success in recent years by developing shows and franchises around key verticals and entertainment, sports and lifestyle talent. Video content licensing and integration of long-form video into premium subscription offerings create further opportunities to make use of the value of longer video.

The implication is that publishers need to move beyond treating video as a single format with a single objective.

What newsroom leaders should do next

What does this mean for newsroom leaders looking to invest in video? The key takeaway is that it is no longer a question of whether to invest in video but a case of how quickly you can build a video portfolio that aligns with your strategy.

Investing mainly in short-form video — as the majority of leaders in the Future Newsroom Study noted — is unlikely to be enough to be sufficient on its own. While it can play a role in brand and content discovery, focusing attention on reach alone will struggle to satisfy audiences' behaviours and will struggle to justify the cost of production, particularly if reach is focused on social media platforms.

This cannot be left to editorial teams alone. Newsrooms must work with product, audience/data and particularly commercial teams to define what each video format is expected to achieve, how it will be distributed, and how success will be measured. Without that alignment, publishers won’t make the most of the video opportunity.

Leaders should also be realistic about internal capabilities. Video content can be an expensive medium and hard to do effectively without the right skills and talent. For publishers starting from a low base, partnering with broadcasters — as the San Francisco Chronicle has done through its video team partnership with KCRA-TV — may be an option. Similarly, establishing strategic tie-ups with content creators can also help avoid the cost and complexity of building every capability in-house from day one.

The overall opportunity for news publishers is to build a more deliberate multimedia strategy that reflects the dual way that audiences now consume news video. That means being clear about the job each format is expected to do: who it is for, where it should live and whether its primary purpose is reach, retention, revenue or brand-building. Short-form and long-form video do not need to compete for attention inside the organisation and, as the Digital New Report shows, should play distinct roles in attracting distinct audiences.