Video has been evolving at Newsday over the last decade, as it has throughout the industry. What hasn’t changed is our goal of serving our audience on all platforms with the most up-to-date and engaging multimedia content.

A strategy shift in 2021 allowed us to significantly increase our video views while decreasing the number of videos produced.

In 2020, we built a state-of-the-art news studio that not only gives us a way to produce great-looking video but also allows us to cut segments for stories, and stream live to our Web site, mobile apps, OTT products, and social media platforms.

We did live election analysis. We hosted Webinars. We put out sports and entertainment shows. We produced daily coronavirus segments and even redesigned our homepage and video page to make videos much more prominent. 

But we realised that building a studio was not going to bring results like the magical baseball field in the movie “Field of Dreams.” We built it, but our audience hadn’t come. 

Taking a step back

So we took a hard look at what kinds of videos we were producing to see what worked and what didn’t. We started having these conversations at a regular Friday meeting with our owner, publisher, and head of video.

Early video strategies were based around volume plays, creating video for as many daily stories as possible — but our metrics showed it was very difficult to build an audience for breaking news video on all but the most compelling of stories. So we added our head of social media and a digital editor to the meeting to add some additional voices to the conversation.

In this meeting, we focus on quality over quantity, looking at our upcoming stories and seeing which ones are the most likely to have the right combination of strong visuals and great storytelling to keep our audience engaged.

This meeting led us to identify two basic types of video:

• Produced packages with a reporter on camera, which we call “MMJ” for “multimedia journalism.”
• Natsound video, which is usually a press conference or other non-hosted video.

On the whole, we’ve found the MMJs usually outperform the natsound, so we began focusing on producing more of the former, less of the latter.

Of course, once you’ve figured out which videos to focus on, you’ve still got to figure out the best way to get them in front of the right people.

Data-driven decisions

Based on the data, we realised we needed to publish our videos earlier in the day and send push alerts at the same time each day to increase awareness and build habits. We’ve had success with e-mail newsletters, so we looked for a way to transplant our learnings into a new daily video newsletter.

We also worked with a vendor that allows us to hyper-target browser-based alerts to the most receptive audience members to create a video alert segment.

And finally, we put more thought and energy into the homepage and app front video presentation, trying everything from animation on top of a video to more prominent placement to sharper wording.

The result of all of this work is that December 2021 was among our best months of the year for video, with 322,712 views, an increase of 121% from 145,995 the previous year. We achieved this growth while going from 306 videos produced in December 2020 down to 101 in December 2021.

We launched our video-specific newsletter and reached 63,117 subscribers. In fact, the NewsdayTV newsletter is now driving 16% of all video views. From essentially zero subscribers, we built our desktop alerts segment to 6,757 people and our mobile apps segment to 566.

Along with the growth driven by our distribution strategy, our Friday meeting helped us with our content strategy. It gave us a venue to have healthy, honest discussions about things that worked and things that didn’t, drawing on the expertise of all parts of the building — from video to digital to social to the business side.

Through a focus on better planning and distribution, our videos overall have gone from getting under 1,000 views to regularly eclipsing 4,000, and occasionally eclipsing 10,000.

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