Innovative Practice | Beijing News' "We Video" content construction strategy
2024-08-12
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On September 11, 2016, the "We Video" jointly launched by the Beijing News and Tencent was officially launched. After several years of practical exploration, "We Video" has developed rapidly, with a Weibo fan base of 15.09 million, successfully becoming a first-tier echelon in the video news industry, becoming a leader in the video transformation of traditional paper media, and providing a good paradigm for the video transformation and development of traditional paper media. In the same year, the goal of "all-media original content production" was proposed; during this period, "We Video" in cooperation with Tencent became the most eye-catching combination model, and now has successfully created the "100 million +" level phenomenon in the era of paper media transformation. The outstanding innovation of "We Video" is the extensive use of video instead of text communication. If you can express it with video, you must not only use text, and gradually realize the video transformation of news. Of course, it is far from enough to rely solely on the advantages of form to enhance the news value and communication effect. "We Video" has developed in text content, communication form, brand image and other aspects. Therefore, this paper takes the "We Video" of the Beijing News as the research object to explore the innovation and development strategy of news products, in order to provide ideas for the future development of other traditional paper media.
1. The current status of the development of “Our Video”
"We Video" focuses on reporting on emergencies and current affairs, emphasizing "only doing news, nothing else", with the slogan "Watch us in news videos". "We Video" covers many fields such as politics, economy, culture, environmental protection, people's livelihood, sports, etc., and its production content accounts for more than half of the total news production of "Beijing News". So far, "We Video" has developed into a mature team of 100 people, with great improvements in content production, content release channels, and user scale.
1. Forming a communication matrix with complete categories
"Our Video" has created a diversified product structure and formed an MCN matrix, including various types of columns such as "Situation", "Faces", "Information", and "Our Live Broadcast". Each column focuses on different areas, creating differentiated products is conducive to brand building. Each column is layered according to the production cycle, and an inverted pyramid product system is formed based on the depth and breadth of news. Such a communication pattern includes multiple types of news programs, which enriches the product structure of "Our Video" and meets the diverse news demands of users. Such a distinctive column focuses on a specific perspective, has its own persistence, and provides the audience with exclusive news works.
2. Rich product release channels
Beijing News and Tencent overcame many obstacles and decided to jointly launch "Our Video", learning from each other's strengths and making up for each other's weaknesses. The combination of the two has produced an effect of one plus one being greater than two. In November 2017, Beijing News decided to cooperate with Sina.com to push news content through multiple channels, while also checking the news content and making differentiated edits. In addition, "Our Video" has established cooperative operation groups with more than 100 media organizations, government microblogs and big Vs on Weibo and Miaopai, allowing the video content to spread rapidly. At the same time, the celebrity effect is reasonably used to expand the dissemination and influence of news.
3. The number of users continues to grow
Compared with the initial stage of the column construction, the number of users of "Our Video" has undergone earth-shaking changes, the number of clicks has increased dramatically, and the influence and attention have increased year by year. "Our Video" has 15.09 million fans on Weibo, an average of more than 1 million views per day, more than 14 billion video views, and more than 134 million reposts, comments and likes. It can be seen that "Our Video" is very popular among users. Traffic and the number of users are the foundation of a column. Users are the market. "Our Video" has successfully occupied the market by relying on big data and a complete communication matrix.
2. Brand building of “Our Video” at the content level
1. Language Features of the Text
1. Friendly language and downward perspective
In "Our Video", the reporting perspective is close to the people, focusing on people's livelihood and hot events. In order to meet the diverse reading needs of the public, "Our Video" uses friendly language and is close to life. It tries to convert professional terms into daily language, or explain them to the public in the video. The easy-to-understand and close-to-life language lowers the threshold for the audience to receive and understand information, making the audience willing to choose to learn about news information through "Our Video".
2. Prominent themes and focus on people’s livelihood
In specific news reports, combined with the length of short videos, "Our Video" focuses on on-site reports of emergencies, close-ups of hot events, follow-up reports, and news reviews with more timely feedback. From the videos released, it can be found that the reports of "Our Video" focus on topics such as social livelihood, traffic environment, emergencies, and cultural security. "Our Video" is designed to give the audience the most intuitive and rich picture experience, so as to better convey information to the audience. For example, the sub-column "Youliao" of "Our Video" focuses on soft news and general information that are popular in society, highlighting the novelty and fun of news; "Our Live Broadcast" focuses on sudden hot events and broadcasts live to the audience; "Chen Di Says" is a news commentary column, in which Chen Di analyzes and interprets the hot topics of public opinion in society, focusing on humanistic feelings.
2. Content creation style
1. Grasp the sense of picture and take into account the sense of scene
"Our Video" focuses on authenticity, and tries to rush to the news scene to shoot the scene to give the audience a sense of reality, thereby increasing the audience's sense of participation and achieving effective empathy communication. The column adopts the "text + mobile live broadcast" model. Although a news short video of more than ten seconds is difficult to present a complete news event or story, focusing on the highlight elements of the event is more likely to generate communication selling points and memory points. The highlight of a video is the display of the scene and the synchronous sound. In the shooting and interview, attention is paid to the collection of the picture. The successful display of visual effects is the key to the success of a video. It should also be noted that the text and the picture complement each other to avoid reading fatigue, catch the eye, attract the audience's attention, and complete the content dissemination of the news video.
2. Narration + subtitles, mostly with synchronous sound
In terms of picture presentation, "Our Video" simplifies the content of the video, removes the cluttered content, and shows the most essential parts. At the same time, in the parts that are difficult to understand or missing, the form of commentary + subtitles is used to help the audience understand the news content. The short video news reports of "Our Video" are mainly based on on-site pictures and synchronous sound, supplemented by the reporter's off-screen interpretation, to fully tell the ins and outs of the event for users. In the era of media convergence, the public pursues visual and auditory experience. The use of synchronous sound and synchronous pictures makes the audience feel like they are on the scene and meets the audience's reading needs.
3. Focus on original content and uphold professionalism
It is understood that "spotlight" is an investigative program that reveals the nature of an event through "undercover"; "face" is a documentary news program; "Vox Pop" uses street interviews to understand the audience's attention to hot events and their attitude towards the event, which is conducive to the media to grasp the direction of public opinion in a timely manner and avoid the occurrence of radical behavior. These columns are original programs created by "Our Video" in 2018 to give full play to the original spirit. In the era of everyone being a self-media, the ideal utopia pursued by journalistic professionalism is still of great significance. The communication team of "Our Video" continues to recruit outstanding talents with rich theoretical knowledge, strong information identification ability and high journalistic ethics to enrich the team. The video materials of "Our Video" are mostly collected by reporters themselves, with interview elements added, and live images and synchronous sound are often used to make professional and real news reports. At the same time, it maintains differences from other media in content production, which has also become a competitive advantage of "Our Video".
(III) Rules for column publishing
1. Release time adapts to audience reading habits
For news short videos, a reasonable release time can ensure that the content can reach more viewers, thereby improving the communication effect. The dissemination of news short videos should take into account the user's attention and information needs, so the release time should match the user's daily life and work rhythm. Short video platforms need to maintain a certain update frequency to attract and retain users. This may involve releasing content at multiple time periods throughout the day. In the era of fragmented reading, the public tends to read fragmented entertainment. Therefore, "Our Video" conforms to the social development trend and the audience's reading habits, forming a stable release pattern, setting the length of news information at about 2 minutes; because the public is in a state of work and study during the day, it is not convenient to receive news information, so the release time period is arranged in the afternoon or evening.
2. The importance of the event determines the frequency of release
The factors that affect the importance of an event mainly include the number of audiences, the duration of the impact on society, and the degree of impact on the behavior of social members. "Our Video" generally judges the importance of an event based on the number of video views and forwardings. For information that has high audience attention and a great impact on society, multiple reports are arranged, and follow-up progress is continuously followed, and the latest information is released in a timely manner to provide the audience with a channel to learn the latest information; on the contrary, for general events, a single report can ensure the dissemination of news information and will not excessively occupy news resources. The release frequency is selected according to the importance of different events to ensure that the dissemination effect of the content is maximized, which is conducive to more audiences receiving information and attracting their attention.
3. Brand building of “We Video” at the platform level
1. Content is king, channels are key
In the current market environment with fierce multimedia competition, traditional paper media need to continue to "control" the quality of content, fully adapt to the development trend of the times, and use multimedia to expand the market. Content and channels are indispensable. Therefore, it is urgent for paper media in transition to build a "new three-horse team", namely all-media editing and compiling, all-media operation, and professional mobile distribution team. "Our Video" adopts multiple channels to push high-quality content, which brings better news dissemination effects and changes the dissemination dilemma of traditional media. In the era of integrated media, traditional media focuses on both content and channels, actively develops "two microblogs and one terminal", realizes differentiated content production, and continuously optimizes all-media content release channels, expands the scope of dissemination, and continuously transmits information, which is conducive to refreshing user favorability and strengthening interaction with users.
2. Focus on brand and enhance brand awareness
"Our Video" cooperates with Tencent, and with the support of Tencent's huge number of users and attention, the brand awareness has been further expanded. In the news short videos released by "Our Video", the symbol "We" will be added in the upper right corner at the beginning, indicating that it is compiled and issued by the "Our Video" column, with a unified logo to form a brand identity. At the same time, during major festivals or events, interact with users to increase their own influence. For example, in November 2023, the Didi software suddenly crashed, and "Our Video" launched a voting activity on Weibo, posting a vote "Didi crashed, has your work been affected?" The public actively participated in the voting. "Our Video" is good at bringing out topics from events and conducting discussions, thereby promoting topic marketing, attracting users to interact and leave messages, increasing influence, and achieving a double increase in traffic and word of mouth.
(III) Change the model and optimize the collection, editing and publishing
In the process of media integration and mobile transformation, the Beijing News strengthened the editorial committee responsibility system and assessment system, and combined with user needs, upgraded the original 7×18-hour content update system to 7×24 hours, and reviewed and published immediately after collection, increasing the content production process from the traditional one-time unified editing to four-time unified editing, realizing the one-time collection, diversified generation, and multi-channel distribution of news content. For the reporting of major events, reporters will send back the on-site images in the form of text, photos, videos, etc., which is beneficial to the subsequent integrated broadcasting, and facilitates the comprehensive sorting and integrated reporting of the events. Nowadays, in the collection and delivery of news, the influence of time and space distance has gradually weakened, and the way of news production has also changed. In layman's terms, due to the development of network technology, the images, sounds, and pictures collected on the scene can be sent back to the base camp from the front in a very short time for editing and publishing. As time goes by, the information sent back increases, which can be integrated with the original information. This information processing method is similar to the "central kitchen". While making full use of information, it also improves the work efficiency of journalists.
4. Image classification and personalized communication
From the perspective of user reading habits and mobile phone design, vertical screen is more convenient for users to watch news. Horizontal screen has a larger information carrying capacity, which is conducive to clearly showing the details of the event and making the narrative more complete. Therefore, in "Our Video", the screen presentation does not only use vertical screen or horizontal screen, but a combination of them. However, due to user reading habits, the proportion of vertical screen in the video is larger, while the horizontal screen is usually used in major events or more serious occasions.
IV. Conclusion
The successful exploration of "Our Video" by Beijing News provides a model for the transformation and development of traditional media. The core of the current media transformation is still mobility, socialization and intelligence, which requires traditional media to pay attention to user needs. The products of "Our Video" win by being "short", with a fast speed of dissemination of news events and more down-to-earth. However, the presentation of news events in the form of short videos is phased and limited, and how to use videos for in-depth reporting still requires active exploration by media professionals. In the process of media integration and development, opportunities and challenges coexist. How to make good use of the advantages of short videos, realize the transition from pan-entertainment to in-depth development, and gradually achieve innovative transformation, still needs further exploration and research.
Source: News World
Editor: Zeng Min
Second trial of Feng Luyu
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