Business

Instagram Wants News on Vertical Video Channel

By Sarvani Nori

Spectrum staff

In addition to being a platform for its existing celebrities and non-celebrity trendsetters and personalities, Instagram’s recently launched vertical video app aims to add news organizations and journalists to its list of users.

Instagram executives, however, are in the early stages of figuring out how IGTV, that new video app, might be used to deliver the news.

“A question we get a lot from journalists is how to tell a story in a way that makes sense on Instagram,” said Lila King, head of global news and publishing partnerships at Instagram.

She said that at a recent “story school” workshop, an Instagram-hosted tutorial on how to to IGTV stories. She and Elisa Benson, who also works for the partnership, conducted the tutorial for the high school journalists attending NYU’s 2018 Urban Journalism Workshop. (Instagram is one of the workshop’s funders.)

Instagram keeps confidential the newsrooms and journalists who undergo its story school training,  King said. Journalists and news organizations, she added, can use IGTV to attract young audiences, which she says is important in ensuring that newsrooms are not just serving certain population groups, while ignoring others.

One news organizations that already is using IGTV is The Washington Post’s Lily News, which targets younger women and is about a year old. Some of news on Lily’s IGTV channel, which includes coverage of  topics such as contraception and hypochondria.

“We saw how people were talking about and to women and young people in general and tried to do something different there,” Amy King, The Lily’s editor and creative director, said in this Nieman Lab article. “There’s a lot of hyperbolic language and slang and we wanted to talk to people in the most normal way we could…. We were able to create something unique, but now it’s become how to get more people to know we exist.”

The Lily’s editors were not available to answer this reporter’s questions.

While Instagram videos can’t exceed one minute, IGTV allows users to post videos that can last up to an hour. Viewers can watch videos from channels they follow, popular culture and content they like, among other offerings.

IGTV, however, isn’t the only platform where journalists can upload long videos. CNN producer Chris James of Beme post his reports on that global network’s YouTube-based news channel. He said he does not believe IGTV will have a direct effect on YouTube.

“I don’t think its affecting it directly,” James said. But, he added, IGTV likely will be a competitor. “It’s definitely a new place for people to create content.”.