Innovation is a word worn thin in the corporate world. It is a mantra on the lips of managers around the world that has infiltrated newsroom lexicons.

After all, the digital revolution has turned journalism upside down, and it has become urgent to seek new approaches — not only for the business model but also for ways way of telling stories.

But the obsession with innovation goes beyond the well-worn term, the excessive use of which creates high-pressure environments that can lead to paralysis — where any results sound like failure if the entire wheel is not reinvented.

So how can we create content that will have an impact on the audience without focusing excessively on a radical paradigm shift?

The short video series Foi Assim, conceived and executed by Nexo Jornal to tell the story of Brazilian elections since the 1985 end of military dictatorship, offers some clues.

Introducing video

In 2022, Nexo was selected for a six-month training course for online audiovisual production. From there came the challenge of producing short videos for platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

That year, Brazil held its ninth presidential election since the end of the military dictatorship (1964-1985) with a direct vote.

This provided a great opportunity to explore a highly relevant topic based on the full potential of a news outlet with clarity and transparency as its main pillars, was already quite used to dealing with editorial projects, and had just received audiovisual training.

The scripts would have to be synthetic without discarding all the complexity of the dispute for power in the largest democracy in Latin America. They would have to be didactic without ignoring the intricacies of politics and economics. They would have to have attractive language without appealing to vulgarisation.

As with any audiovisual material, the success of the language would depend on a fluid connection between text and image. This would require the involvement of design, infographics, and data professionals. And, mainly, it would depend on amply coordinated direction among the teams.

None of the individual decisions and referrals were innovations per se. However, the union of all of them resulted in different content: agile but not shallow, simple but not simplistic, complex but not complicated.

That led to a relevant product for the consolidation of Nexo on YouTube and Instagram and for the news outlet’s debut on TikTok, where it received more than 1.8 million views.

Mission accomplished

In the end, this complicated challenge achieved the objectives of the newsroom:

• To reach Nexo’s targeted young audience in its mission to open doors for news consumption.
• To inform public debate that is increasingly poisoned by bias and misinformation.

Nexo is a Brazilian digital news outlet focused on explanatory journalism. It is subscription-funded and advertising-free. By contextualising the Brazilian elections in short three-minute videos, Nexo took another step in its nearly eight-year journey.

It reached new audiences while maintaining the principles of its editorial mission. It spread credible information, awakening interest in a central issue of democracy.

It stimulated a newsroom that constantly seeks the best way to tell stories. In short, it innovated without reinventing the wheel. Let the next challenge come.

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