The average person will spend about 100 minutes per day online watching videos, according to a report from Statista released earlier this year. Are newsrooms prepared to meet their audiences not just on static websites or social media feeds with infographics, but with videos?
Fran Wills is the CEO of the Local Media Consortium, an 11-year-old organization that has developed digital partnerships with more than 150 local media companies of all kinds in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.
“Video content is forecasted to make up about 82 percent of internet traffic by 2025, so audiences that are following video are growing at a very rapid pace and the money is following,” she says. It is anticipated that the amount of money companies spend on video content for digital platforms will increase 16 percent this year alone, “which is 80 percent faster than total media growth,” Wills says.
The Local Media Consortium seeks to “leverage member scale to negotiate digital partnerships with service and technology providers to reduce costs and increase member revenue,” helping the 5,000 newspaper, radio, TV and digital news outlets represented by its partners to produce more videos at a better price than if they tried to negotiate contracts on their own.
“We are looking to deliver the latest and greatest digital technology at the best price so we can deliver that benefit to our members,” Wills says. “Last year, we delivered about $60 million worth of benefits to our members, which has a pretty significant impact on their bottom line.”
LMC, as Wills calls it, has 35 digital partners it works with to create videos for its media partners, several of which are focused on video productions, including Ex.Co, a video player that helps member newsrooms monetize video content. “It’s really accelerated with adoption since we launched it last fall,” she says. “We also have a partner called Video Bolt that helps publishers produce affordable video content for advertisers.”
Videos created for news organizations are utilized across the newsroom’s social media networks in addition to YouTube, newsletters and other digital platforms. To help support its video efforts, Newsday on Long Island has built its own studio to produce videos and, as a result, now has more than 33,000 subscribers to its YouTube page and more than 10,000 followers on TikTok, Wills says.
Radio station members of LMC have started streaming videos of top radio personalities for sharing on YouTube and TikTok as well. This helps reporters become not just trusted sources of information for readers, listeners and viewers, but brings them into the same sphere as social media influencers in their own right.
“With our partnerships, (news outlets) can have confidence that these are legitimate resources and help them get into dipping their toes into creating video,” she says.
Fran Wills, CEO of the Local Media Consortium, discusses how digital video has become the go-to news and information source for a growing number of people and what that means for local news.
