Video as a product is a powerful asset for news publishers because it offers “a combination of emotion, clarity adn trust,” Gautam told our World News Media Congress participants in Krakow.
“Our audiences no longer want top-down delivery. They want storytelling that actually meets them where they are in a conversational, clear and emotionally intelligent way. This is how you build and earn trust at scale,” Gautam said.
Video is ‘closest thing to one-on-one human interaction’
Gautam has spent 17 years in tech, the past six of those at CNN, where she led the advancement of their new content publishing system, before leaving the broadcaster in May.
This content system not only includes everything CNN’s editors,journalists and producers use every day to distribute breaking news,but is “also very much a platform for our product and engineering team to be able to rapidly iterate and experiment and deploy new features,” she said.
In addition, Gautam has been chair of the Board of Directors for the News Product Alliance for the past year. This alliance is a community of more than 3,000 news product builders, leaders, and thinkers from local to large newsrooms worldwide.
Through her work at CNN and with the News Product Alliance, Gautam said she’s been able to see a wide variety of examples of video use from newsrooms of all sizes.
Video provides “the closest that our audience is going to get to one-on-one interaction with a human. this is why it adds so much emotional weight, clarity and recall,” she said.
‘We don’t have a video problem. We have a strategy problem.’
News publishers need to concentrate on their strategy with video, she said. Video needs to be treated like a product, she said: “That means it has to be clearly defined, and there must be ownership of that product.”
As with other products, there are a set of specific questions that need to be addressed. these include:
“It’s not just about putting video out and shipping outputs.We need to really focus on building a strategy around it,” Gautam said.
What specific business goals is the video strategy designed to achieve?
Is it growth?
Is it retention?
Is it revenue?
Is it trust?
“If you cannot name it, you cannot measure it: so purpose before production,” she said.
Wan-Ifra Members can access the slides from Upasna Gautam’s presentation, as well as an audio replay of it on our Knowledge Hub.
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