What formats should we use for news and why

From the newsrooms of the digital media they have to constantly decide the format that they will give to the news in order to reach the widest possible audience and be able to explain the news in a clear way.

Last week we attended a talk by Paul Kirby, the Europe editor of BBC News website. It was a short and entertaining talk where topics related to digital journalism and the BBC were discussed, among them we asked Kirby about the choice of news formats from the BBC newsroom.

He assured us that far from being something rare, the choice between text and video is a decision that must be faced from a newsroom every single day. Choosing between the two formats is usually a “conflict” because both have advantages and disadvantages.

Text vs video

News formats not only depend on the visual content that journalists have obtained, but it also depends on the type of story it is, its complexity and what you want to transmit with it.

It is true that the choice of format is greatly influenced by the images that journalists have recorded, Paul told us. It must be assumed that to make videos they need high quality content and recordings, if pictures are good and they think that it is the best way of telling a story they will go for a video format.

In relation to hard stories sometimes when they are difficult to explain because of their complexity and sometimes video is the best way of telling the story because if stories are broken up into different elements they are easily understandable. Images and subtitles help so much in order to explain difficult concepts or situations.

On the other hand for getting the sensitive part of a story they tend to use text because not necessarily a video can transmit more than a text. The text has been the basic format until a few years ago, but new formats that are being implemented are sometimes a better way to transmit and report what is happening.

Consumers preferences reports

The Digital News Report 2020 from Reuters Institute affirm that consumer preferences around video and audio are changing, which opens up new possibilities for publishers, but changing the resources of the text carries significant risks, while the commercial benefits are still far away to be verified.

The report reflects that young people consume more video news than older people because they are more exposed via Facebook and YouTube, but the speed and control that comes through reading often seems to trump this when it comes to underlying preference.

Looking at the absolute consumption of different types of video news, we also see interesting regional differences in line with these stated preferences. Nine out of ten say they access video news online weekly in Turkey (95%), Kenya (93%), the Philippines (89%) and Hong Kong (89%), but only about half of this proportion does in northern European countries, such as Germany (43%), Denmark (41%) and the United Kingdom (39%).

The latest report on news consumption among Spanish users by researchers from the Center for Internet Studies and Digital Life reveal that the most consumed formats are news texts and articles, headlines, videos and photo galleries, but texts and videos are the preferred news formats for information.

Their study revealed that four out of ten users prefer to watch news online rather than read it, and 68% consume informational videos in 2020. A majority watch online news videos in all age groups and socio-demographics. Those who consume less news say that they prefer to watch than read, but access less informative video than the rest.