Since its launch in 2020, VD News has operated as an independent media outlet. In its early days, the editorial approach was strongly focused on communities and realities that were often marginalised, giving them the space that other outlets frequently denied or restricted.

Over time, VD evolved, incorporating increasingly complex content, such as reportages, documentaries, and recognisable formats while never losing sight of the social and cultural transformations shaping contemporary Italy and the wider world.

At VD News, we believe the real risk today is that journalism becomes sterile: free to describe reality without actually getting its hands dirty out in the real world. Too often, news is the product of wire services, press releases, or reworked online content, rarely making genuine contact with the people at the heart of the stories.

Our approach has always been different: committed, first and foremost, to being present in the places where stories unfold, evolve, and exist, before they ever become news.

This is the creative process behind VD’s editorial agenda: the community is at the centre, and our journalistic initiative serves it directly. Our stories come from direct contacts, editorial research and reporting, and, frequently, from tips submitted by our followers, the organisations we work with, and the associations we support.

Ultimately, the community and the people VD seeks to reach become both the architects and the audience of our journalism. We use calls to action and organise in-person events to genuinely place people — and the kaleidoscopic world of their lived experiences — at the centre of everything we do.

Leaning into video

The format through which VD expresses itself most naturally — and for which we have become recognised — is video. Video is adaptable, cuttable, reworkable, and suited to reaching different audiences across different platforms. We regularly extract short clips from long-form content, typically published on YouTube, and distribute them across social media.

We apply the same logic to our podcasts: thanks to the synergies we create within our publishing group, GEDI, we produce high-quality video podcasts that are then distributed across platforms in the formats and ways that best meet audience expectations and platform dynamics.

Today, we evaluate every production through three key lenses: editorial value for our community, distribution potential across platforms, and economic sustainability, including through partnerships and co-productions.

The power of community

VD is, above all, its community. Every month, we reach approximately 19 million users across all the platforms where we operate. We also launched a Web site in February 2025, which now records around 40,000 monthly users, in a space we consider proprietary and free from platform-driven logic.

Across all major social platforms, as of March 2026 we have surpassed 1.8 million followers, with an average growth rate of 42% over the past 12 months.

Given VD’s significant video output, throughout 2025 and into early 2026, we have accumulated over 1 billion views on social media and more than 36 million interactions, with an average engagement rate per platform exceeding 3.4%.

Our two podcasts, La Botta and MyGen, have together accumulated over 430,000 streams across all major platforms in the past year.

VD’s future is deeply tied to the reality it operates in and to the people whose stories and perspectives it tells. Our goal is to become a point of reference both online and offline, continuing to produce uncompromising content, involving our audience in the development of editorial projects, and helping translate those efforts into concrete solutions to the challenges facing new generations.

The spirit of the project is perhaps best captured in the words of VD News Head of Content Daria Volpe: “In a landscape where information is increasingly fast-paced and standardised, our ambition is to keep investing in presence, depth, and relationship, maintaining an independent perspective that is rooted in reality.”

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