Short-form video has fundamentally rewired how audiences, particularly younger ones, discover, engage with, and share news. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels have become primary news gateways for a generation of consumers who were never going to seek out a homepage or a print edition. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025, over half of under-35s in the United States — 54% of 18–24s and 50% of 25–34s — now say that social media and video networks are their main source of news, up 13 and 6 percentage points respectively compared with the previous year. The shift is not confined to young people; all age groups are prioritising social media over traditional channels such as websites and TV news.
For most legacy publishers, the response has been reactive: repurpose existing TV packages, trim them down, post them on social, and hope the algorithm rewards the effort. It rarely does. For publishers that have not adapted their editorial approach to meet audiences where they actually are, that gap is widening into a structural audience crisis.
Nation Media Group took a different path. Rather than treating short-form video as a distribution channel, NMG built it as a dedicated editorial desk, with its own team, workflow, creative grammar, and performance logic. The results have been hard to ignore: a TikTok account that crossed one million followers, a single story, the Mercy Avoga “sticker girl” feature that generated 11 million views and 400,000 shares, and an emerging proof of concept that quality journalism, told in the right format, can compete with entertainment content for the attention of audiences who were never supposed to care about the news. For NMG, closing the gap meant rethinking not just where it published, but how content was built from the ground up.
James Smart, Managing Editor, Broadcast and New Media at Nation Media Group, has been at the centre of that transformation. In this conversation with State of Digital Publishing, he talks candidly about what it took to build the desk, what the data has revealed about audience behaviour, how the newsroom protects journalists facing platform hostility, and why the future of journalism may depend on individual reporters building personal brands that audiences trust as much as the masthead behind them.
NMG moved away from repurposing linear content to building a dedicated short-video desk. What was the moment or data point that made it clear the old strategy was no longer working?
Audience behaviour generally indicates a clear pattern: users expect content to be relevant, to reach them in a format that doesn’t disrupt their scroll habits, and, most importantly, to be shareable with their own communities and to allow commenting. It was clear that we needed to stretch the concept of publishing to meet our users where they were and not where we imagined they should be.
You brought in a small team of in-house news content creators rather than retraining existing journalists. How did you decide on that structure, and what did you look for when hiring?
It was not that our journalism wasn’t good; the problem to solve was that the good content wasn’t being picked up. The language of new media has shifted to video, to be more specific, short videos. So, we had an opportunity to trial an idea without disrupting the newsroom workflow, which is important – get a small team, train them on vertical videos, delivery, editing and give them the creative and journalistic license to roam on internal content, repurpose it in a language short video platform would love. So, it was a lot more of an experiment on both the technique and the topics. We have learnt a lot of subject matters that would do well, which extends our journalism to areas we wouldn’t have reached before and to audiences who wouldn’t have cared about this content. Our next iteration is training existing journalists to slowly take up this space, which requires a slightly different approach.
You mentioned in your article that you are training the team on vertical video and upskilling their journalism sensibilities. What did that training actually look like, and how long before you saw consistent quality output?
The first assignment was for them to watch as many short videos on the internet as possible, then codify and pick out common characteristics to understand what the algorithm loves. They found fast-paced editing, captions, clear video, flawless audio, and a tone that was relatable. This was important. They then trained for four weeks internally, improving their techniques, and launched with one video a day to test the ground before building to three videos daily. What this process taught was the need to improve internal workflow and tighten processes so that the new desk did not interrupt the newsroom schedule, and secondly, to learn from audience feedback from the first videos and improve while audiences were watching, without them noticing that this period was being used to create a habit and a relationship.
The Mercy Avoga story generated 11 million views and 400K shares. How does NMG distinguish between content that performs and content that actually serves your editorial and business goals?
Our learning with this desk has been gradual. In the beginning, we started out with a broad question: Can the content we produce be relevant to younger audiences? That answered the question of what content performs, and we graduated to: does the content this desk produces convert users back to our own platforms and subscribers? We are showing it’s possible, and conversions are happening, albeit slowly. We have to teach audiences how to consume us, and this is a continuous lesson.
You described comments and engagement as data points that teach your newsroom the “grammar of platforms.” How has audience feedback on TikTok concretely changed how you report or distribute stories?
Our newsroom is data-informed in how we pitch stories, which means our journalists find data points to advance stories, and, at the far end of the spectrum, the content created for short videos gives us more information about the pulse of audiences. The comment section for us is a great treasure trove where it instantly informs us of the views of audiences, new angles to explore, or, more often than not, stories that require follow-up.
Audience hostility is a growing reality for platform-native journalists. What structures or support systems has NMG put in place to protect reporters receiving tough or unwarranted feedback?
Unfortunately, there’s no escaping negative comments on social platforms. This is a feature of these spaces, and we can try to minimize its effects by technically doing what the platforms make possible, like blocking comments, hiding some keywords, or reporting threatening behaviour. In broad terms, as a broadcast journalist myself, one of the key lessons I learnt when I joined TV was that these left-field comments will keep coming in the public space, so I learnt how to develop a thick skin and roll with the punches. It helps that our Editor-In-Chief is also a TV journalist, and our combined experience has led us to turn our offices into therapy stations where any journalist receiving tough feedback from the audience gets immediate attention from Dr Joe Ageyo and me. We contextualise the comments to help journalists reframe this moment, providing them with as much support as they need and as much time as they require before delving back into that world. So far, everyone who has had this treatment has done follow-up videos, and they have had the last laugh. It really is a work in progress and dealing with it case by case. In the end, the interest is the healthy state of the journalists, giving them enough protection, care and guidance to navigate the moment, and they are really moments as opposed to a statement on someone’s career or journalism.
Mercy Avoga is now known as “sticker girl”, a journalist with a personal brand built through a news story. Is NMG deliberately building journalist personas as part of its platform strategy, and where do you draw the line between journalist and influencer?
In my view, journalism of the future will survive on authenticity; we have to trust the people in the kitchen cooking up things. Journalists’ personal brands will be key to survive a present where there’s an abundance of content that is struggling to breathe. If individual journalists can influence their own beat, backed up by the company brand, and help audiences navigate the confusion of disinformation and misinformation, then let’s have it.
Growing a TikTok account to 1 million followers is a significant achievement. Has that translated into measurable revenue or audience conversion back to NMG’s core platforms, and how are you tracking it?
The key metric to track is conversions to owned platforms, and we track the number of subscriptions fetched.
Many publishers are still doing exactly what NMG moved away from, that is, dumping TV or print content onto social platforms. What is the single most important mindset shift they need to make first?
That publishing doesn’t stop with putting up content on your social platforms; it starts after you press publish, then create new content on top of your content so that your audience can find your content. The audience actually wants to experience your content; just make it available in their language, tone, and platform.
Platforms change constantly, as you noted. With 1 million TikTok followers, what is NMG’s contingency thinking if the platform shifts its algorithm, restricts news content, or loses its audience to the next emerging platform?
We expect the algorithm to change and be tweaked; it is the only constant we can count on. We mostly care about the user journey and track the slightest changes in audience behaviour; when they occur, we learn and pivot. The final aim is for them to find our content and continue converting them to our owned platform. Newsroom strategy has to shift from the boardroom to the real newsroom, where we can engineer changes as they happen. Learn and fail fast; that is the key lesson.
When journalists become recurring faces on a platform, does the newsroom have to think differently about burnout, visibility, or personal boundaries?
Absolutely, which is why our second iteration of this is to train more from traditional journalism so that we have a variety. In the end, our strategy is to have a newsroom that is fluent in understanding audiences and serving them better at their points of need. We have successfully shown that journalism can compete in our world, where entertainment and other content perform really highly.
Final Thoughts
Good journalism failing to reach its audience is a distribution and format problem. Solving it does not require abandoning editorial standards. It requires learning a new language.
For publishers still posting trimmed TV clips and wondering why their social reach is stagnant, the lesson from Nation Media Group is that publishing does not end when you press post. It starts there. The audience is not just waiting for your content; they are waiting for it in a format, tone, and platform experience that aligns with their preferences.
The publishers who understand this earliest will not just survive the shift to platform-native news consumption. They will help define what serious journalism looks like for the generation that may never have read a print newspaper, and may never will.
