Text RIP

Video is so much more than a “pivot”

I was a little bit distracted this week. The Europa League final took over my Wednesday night and – shhh, please don’t tell my business partner – most of Thursday too.

Tottenham Hotspur don’t win trophies very often – the last one was 17 long years ago – so after we did I scoured the web for hot and cold takes wherever I could get them. I listened to podcasts, I watched reels and TikToks, I feasted on the memes.

After a while, I realised that most of what I was listening to and watching was emphatically not text.

This is becoming the default now, not just for sport, but news, politics, life and style. There’s still excellent long-form writing out there and I will always seek it out. But, generally speaking, in the moments when people are truly engaged, they're more likely to be watching or listening than reading.

Not always, but often enough that it should be shaping the way publishers think about their output – which was the subject of an article I wrote this week for Tomorrow’s Publisher.

Most newsrooms are still built on a text-first production line. You can see it in the way video teams are looped in after the fact, if at all.

Publishers need to flip that thinking. Commissioning should start with a format-agnostic question: what is the best way to tell this story? Do we film it? Animate it? Record it? Write it? And who are the people who can do that work?

I say all this as someone who loves text, who has built a career in and around the written word. But liking something is not a strategy. We’re in a transitional phase, and the smart publishers are treating the shift to audio and video not as a threat, but as an opportunity.