Journalists do not need expensive equipment to become creators, according to Axel Springer trainees Vinzenz Mayer and Lisa Reck.

What they need most is time.

“You just need the time to actually produce the reels,” Mayer said. Journalists need dedicated hours to create social videos without simultaneously facing pressure to write articles, he added.

Speaking at the recent INMA Young Audiences Summit, Mayer and Reck explained how they spent six months at the Axel Springer Academy of Journalism and Technology exploring ways to integrate creators into the company’s media brands. They developed social accounts, experimented with creator-led journalism, and then brought what they had learned into their newsrooms.

“We were journalists, but we wanted to be creators,” Reck said.

Testing creator formats

Academy participants created about 10 accounts covering different subjects. Reck focused on sports and pop culture, while Mayer experimented with journalism for a broad audience and tabloid journalism.

They also considered how the formats could be integrated into newsrooms, including what the accounts would cost and what benefits they could provide.

After returning to her editorial team in July, Reck began working as a social host. She works for sports streaming service Dyn, where much of the content is behind a paywall. Publishing on social media allows her to reach people who may not otherwise encounter its journalism.

Reck shared an example involving a handball game in which stickers on the floor had come loose, creating a risk for players. After she explained the problem using video and images from the stream, viewers contacted her to say they finally understood what had happened and why it was dangerous.

“Everyone was just writing about it, but no one has explained this with the stream, with the pictures on it,” she said.

For Reck, social video provides a way to make specialised sports reporting understandable beyond audiences already familiar with the subject.

Bringing ideas back

Reck first presented the idea of creator-led journalism to her newsroom about a year earlier. She argued that creators were already doing work journalists should be doing.

“I’m supposed to tell the stories because I work in the newsroom,” she said. “I have the stories, I have the actual access to the stories, but we don’t tell them on social media.”

Winning support took time. Reck repeatedly shared examples and discussed creators at conferences until the newsroom accepted the idea. Creator-led social journalism subsequently became part of her job.

Her colleagues now suggest stories that could work for social media, particularly when they have expertise in sports Reck cannot cover alone. Dyn also works with established creators on a freelance basis, although Reck said she is the only person doing this work as part of the newsroom’s daily operations.

Newsroom policies can make the process more complicated. Reck pointed to restrictions involving music and images, which can make publishing as part of a media brand more difficult than posting as an individual creator.

Building a Creators Club

Mayer works for German tabloid Bild, which has taken a different approach to incorporating creators.

Alongside journalistic creators, Bild has brought in entertainment creators, including streamers and comedians, to produce short videos for its homepage. The initiative, called the Creators Club, had about 30 creators publishing content at the time of the presentation.

Some material was created for specific Bild events, but Mayer said most of the content consisted of reels that had already appeared on other platforms. The creators featured in the club were already successful elsewhere, and participation was not open to everyone.

Mayer said change inside a large organisation happens slowly. Although there had been many discussions about integrating more creators into Bild’s Web site, he did not believe his own work had influenced the company’s policies.

Reaching the audience

Mayer said Bild’s content is not the problem. The difficulty is getting it in front of younger audiences who are not coming directly to the brand.

“We have to bring the content to them,” he said.

Other creators already use reporting from news organisations to make social videos and earn money, Mayer said. They read an article, create a video about it, and receive the financial benefit instead of the newsroom that produced the original journalism.

His own experience also demonstrated the difference between article and social audiences. Friends contacted him after seeing the reels he made, but none had messaged him about one of his articles.

Reck said journalists must work on the platforms where audiences encounter information rather than limiting their reporting to paywalls or newspapers. In conversations with friends, she frequently hears that they learned something on TikTok and responds by asking whether they checked the information or understood the creator’s background.

“I think it’s our job as a journalist to clarify this whole news thing and to do our job also on these platforms,” she said.

Time matters most

Basic equipment can support creator journalism, but it does not need to be elaborate. Mayer recalled that Reck began with wired headphones costing about €10.

When Reck’s boss asked what she needed, she requested a new phone because her storage was always full. She now records about 90% of her material with a phone and microphone.

The larger requirement is protected production time. Social reporting also needs to move quickly because breaking news loses value when another creator publishes first, Reck said.

Some of her previous written assignments have now been replaced by TikTok or Instagram content. When time allows, a reel script can also become a written story, but the social format may stand alone.

Mayer would like to continue writing while having one or two hours each day to create reels and integrate them into his articles. Repeatedly seeing a journalist’s face could help audiences develop a relationship with the author and build trust in the brand, he said.

Reck also wants to continue researching stories and publishing them on social media.

“I like to just press down the story in 60 seconds and make it accessible for everyone,” she said. “I like this work.”

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