Almost exactly a decade ago, the media industry talked itself into a pivot to video. Publications poured money into social video, hired teams, and handed Facebook the keys to their reach — only to discover the numbers were inflated and the money was not there — and that the writers cut to fund video were followed, in time, by cuts to the video teams themselves.
Now a second pivot is underway — but its shape is different. The formats are different, the platforms are different, and this time the publishers know exactly how the story ended last time. They are doing it anyway.
How the first pivot to video started
The first pivot to video began in 2015, when media companies started cutting staff for written content in favour of short-form video on third-party platforms. Facebook set the tone that January, reporting more than one billion video views a day.
The premise turned out to be false. In September 2016, Facebook admitted it had inflated the numbers it reported to advertisers about how long viewers watched video ads — an overestimation of 60 to 80 percent. The newsrooms had already restructured around the belief those numbers created. Mashable fired much of its editorial staff in April 2016; in June 2017, Vocativ laid off its entire newsroom and Fox Sports eliminated its writing staff; the following month Vice laid off at least 60 employees. In February 2018, Vox cut about 50 employees, mostly from social video.
As the journalist Brian Feldman put it in 2017, “pivoting to video” had become “a slick way to describe something else: layoffs.” For many in the industry, social video still brings to mind layoffs and instability rather than the promised abundance.
The audience moved first
The second pivot has a different origin: the growth of TikTok during the pandemic, Instagram’s Reels, YouTube Shorts and, as Mia Sato of The Verge notes, a lot of AI slop. Social media companies reorganised their feeds to emphasise video, and the audience followed: 20 percent of Americans now regularly get news from TikTok, according to Pew Research Center — 39 percent of people aged 18 to 29.
Meanwhile YouTube has become the most popular streamer, commanding nearly 16 percent of TV viewing, according to Nielsen. Compared with a decade ago, the barrier to entry and cost of making video content has plummeted: anyone with a smartphone can become a video creator.
Everything is being reformatted to fit. Podcasts became videos, which became bite-sized clips for vertical feeds; news articles — even major investigations — are now adapted for vertical audiences. Sato calls the phenomenon “the clippening”: the reformatting of all media to be legible in a vertical video feed, even if the original work is neither vertical nor video.
What the newsrooms are doing
Publishers were slow to jump in, understandably given past experience. It took years for some to start incorporating vertical video into their websites, apps and stories. But the experiments are now concrete — and the distinction matters: this time publishers are keeping their reporting intact and adding video as a parallel distribution channel, rather than cutting writers to fund it as they did in the 2010s. Current participation does not itself demonstrate a repeat of the first pivot’s staffing model.
CNN partnered with Jubilee, the channel that produces debate-style videos on hot-button topics, and conducted its town hall with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico in the Jubilee style. The New York Times recently introduced the vertical series “The Call”. The Post has spun up creator networks, and a program supported by Poynter and Microsoft pairs content creators with news outlets.
Some publishers are also trying to own the experience rather than rent it. The Times’ editor-curated Watch tab autoplays as soon as it opens; video consumption on its platform has doubled over the past year as it now produces roughly 75 hours of video a month. CNN went further, moving short-form video onto its home screen in November 2025 as a swipeable Shorts feed. As Chris Chang, a senior multimedia journalist at Sinclair’s National News Desk, put it: “It’s to make sure the journalism actually reaches people where they already are.”
The ground is shifting again
Just as newsrooms are getting comfortable with front-facing selfie videos, the platforms are testing a move beyond short form. The experiments so far point toward longer-form, higher-production entertainment — and toward the television set — but whether they harden into a new format demand is still open.
This spring, YouTube’s pitch to content creators and advertisers was to make exclusive shows for the platform. Instagram is pushing in the same direction: its recently announced “Features” effort allows for 90-minute horizontal video uploads, seemingly aimed squarely at television viewing. The BBC struck a deal with YouTube in early 2026 to create special programming for the platform, then followed it up by announcing a 24/7 YouTube livestream in an effort to reach young people. Even X, traditionally associated with text, runs an invite-only bonus program paying creators who post short-form videos regularly.
There are no signs of the appetite slowing down. Time spent watching Reels on Facebook was at an all-time high in the third quarter, and early tests in other countries suggest Meta is toying with dropping users directly into full-screen video on opening the Instagram and Facebook apps. A Reuters Institute survey of news executives found video networks the single biggest area where publishers plan to increase effort in 2026, with YouTube and TikTok topping the list.
You can’t eat views
One of the misguided beliefs of pivot-to-video 1.0 was that traction, views or engagement on social platforms would be enough to offset — and ideally surpass — the cost of making the content. For many publishers, that turned out not to be true. And the metric itself has quietly changed meaning: social media companies have largely settled on “views” as the number of times a post was served up on somebody’s feed, whether they watched the whole thing or swiped away immediately.
As Sato writes: “You can’t eat views.” How many people who watch a clip of a podcast go on to listen to the full episode? Do the people watching a publisher’s clips ever become readers — or subscribers? Short-form audiences were recently described as “rented attention” in the Link In Bio newsletter — and the open question is whether longer formats might create more durable relationships, or simply raise the production bar beyond what most newsrooms can clear.
The deeper pattern is the push and pull itself. News publishers live in a constant negotiation with the platforms that make their work discoverable: the platforms signal what kind of content to prioritise, and everyone scrambles to meet the new demand. The web standards expert Terence Eden summed up the relationship in a quote from a 2023 story on Google’s AMP format: “If Google said, ‘you must have your homepage colored bright pink on Tuesdays to be the result in Google,’ everybody would do it, because that’s what they need to do to survive.”
Short form is not going anywhere, at least right now. But the move into longer, more resource-intensive video could be a harbinger of what is to come — and of what could soon be asked of news publishers and influencers alike. The question is whether the format will change again — and if it does, who pays for the rebuild, and whether the audience follows. The documented cost of the last rebuild is written in the layoffs of 2016 to 2018; whether this one repeats that pattern is still an open question, and it is the one that matters most.
