What’s the great comeback story of the past year? Video. 

A quick flashback: Remember when “pivot to video” was a thing? The iPhone4 was released in 2010 with a forward-facing camera, and user-generated content on YouTube took off like a rocket. A few years later, Mark Zuckerberg told the world Facebook would prioritise video. 

In short order, the entire media industry jumped on the bandwagon. We laid off writers and hired video teams, salivating over the prospect of widening the tops of our funnels and monetising preroll. 

Alas, soon we found Facebook had been artificially inflating its ad viewership numbers. And, as Harvard’s NiemanLab noted, “the phrase ‘pivot to video’ has become a joke, shorthand for a media company’s last-ditch effort to turn things around before the layoffs begin.”

All this history makes it all the more interesting then that many news organisations are now pouring resources into video again.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently hired 30 people to work on its video operation. 

“With this investment programme, the FAZ aims to accelerate its development in the areas of video journalism and podcasts, as well as its presence on social media,” the news brand announced. 

“We want to focus our digital offerings even more clearly on their usefulness and relevance for our readers. At the same time, journalism today reaches many people — especially younger target groups — increasingly via video, audio and social media platforms; we want to be visible there with the FAZ signature.”

Similarly, The Guardian just hired a team to work on video production, part of its strategy to build a sustainable long-term future by making the publication “more visual, digital, global and experimental.”

And the CEO of The New York Times recently said, “We want to be as prepared for watching as we are today for reading and listening.” 

The news brand recently launched a “Watch” tab in its app, featuring a TikTok-inspired, swipeable vertical video feed with short-form clips (under three minutes) spanning news, opinion, NYT Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic. In September 2025, the amount of video consumed across the portfolio was more than double that of the year before.

And at The Atlantic, the size of the video podcast team has almost doubled, while revenue from its podcasts has grown 104% year-over-year and downloads have increased nearly 50%.

“We see video as another place where we can reach and engage with audiences to bring them smart, analytical journalism at a time when it’s needed across all mediums,” said Claudine Ebeid, The Atlantic’s executive producer for audio. 

You can see why so many news organisations are reconsidering video seriously: Studies such as the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s Digital News Report 2026 show social media and video networks are, on average, more popular than both TV and owned news Web sites and apps as sources of news.  

And as we’ve pointed out before, short-form vertical video represents the biggest overall advertising opportunity to publishers, with 70% of display spend projected to shift to digital video formats by 2028.

Some news brands, such as European Pravda, are speaking candidly about their FOMO when it comes to video.

“Video is where I was hesitant — not skeptical exactly, but hesitant,” said co-founder and editor Sergiy Sydorenko. “Our donors and friends pushed us toward it many times, and holding back was a mistake.

“For a while I told myself that video was for an audience that isn’t our core — people who don’t like to read, who don’t shape politics in Ukraine. But I was wrong. I started hearing that senior policymakers — government leaders, MPs — were referring to things that were in our videos but not our text. They’d tell me it was easier to listen to an explanation while driving. So, we have to invest in video even when the audience isn’t large because some people need it that way.”

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