Inside the newsroom push to turn print reporters into video talent

It’s a necessary investment for publishers as people change how they find and consume news, driven by social platforms and AI search. These initiatives show video is no longer a side project within newsrooms, but a core editorial format. Researchers for the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that audiences now get more news from social media and video platforms than from news sites or publishers’ own apps.

At The New York Times, this push is now someone’s full-time job. In March, the publisher hired Tom Denison as video training editor, tasked with coaching reporters and editors and spotting ways to extend their reporting into video, according to a staff memo from Charlotte Greensit, managing editor of visuals at the Times.

“With this dedicated resource, we’ll make our training more systematic and even better aligned with video strategy, desk priorities and the newsroom’s evolving needs.” Greensit wrote. “We’ve seen that the most effective video training happens in small groups and one-on-one; that is where Tom’s combination of craft expertise and collaborative temperament will be most powerful.”

Reporter-led video output at The Times doubled year over year in Q1 2026, CEO Meredith Kopit-Levien said on a recent earnings call. The Times declined an interview request with Denison.

The explosion of “news creators,” as highlighted in Reuters Institute’s report, underlines that people increasingly turn to individual names and faces for news, not mastheads. Publishers are competing with those personalities for attention, which is why more news orgs are pushing reporters to build on-camera identities to drive acquisition and engagement. Reuters Institute’s report found that 27% of people globally get news each week from news-focused creators or influencers, and 46% get news from creators of any type.

The Wall Street Journal is taking a similar tack as the Times with the WSJ Talent Lab team, a dedicated team focused on “upskilling” journalists for video and other audience-facing formats, Taneth Evans, head of digital at WSJ, told Digiday. The lab teaches reporters to shoot vertical video, appear on podcasts, and author newsletters — all in service of making individual journalists more visible to subscribers. Devin Smith, who launched the first creator network at USA Today’s sports media group, serves as the lab’s director. 

“News is often seen as a commodity now, and so our journalists are our biggest differentiator. Leaning into their personal brand is a really important priority for us right now,” Evans said.

The Talent Lab, launched in the spring, runs as an “always-on” training development hub, with broad newsroom training and rotating cohorts of reporters who receive more intensive, one-on-one coaching.

So far, the lab has held group training sessions for nearly 200 journalists.

Evans said the lab was created to help reporters build direct relationships with subscribers and deepen trust, while recognizing that many in the newsroom didn’t yet feel “comfortable or confident” in new formats. 

Depending on a journalist’s strengths, that might mean building a podcast strategy around them, or honing their newsletter voice.

“All of our journalists know how to tell a story, but they don’t always know how to set up a vertical video, what to do with their hands while being filmed, or the difference between speaking on a podcast versus television,” she said. “More broadly, we guide reporters on how to develop their voice and present their stories in a different way while also being confident that they are maintaining the Journal’s standards. Ultimately it’s about making them confident in using their new skills — whether that’s when they’re crafting their talking points, or deciding what’s best to wear on camera.”

WSJ hasn’t had to staff up much to support its video push. Instead, it has embraced a cross-functional approach that pulls in editors, visual reporters, product managers, and audience leads. “It’s required project management, above all else,” Evans said. “But more than anything, this wasn’t creating a new team. It was creating a new framework for us all to work within.”

Meanwhile, Fortune is on the cusp of launching its biggest video product this year, Adam Banicki, head of video at Fortune, told Digiday. The business publisher will debut a daily show called “Fortune Daily” this month, a roughly 20-minute program featuring news analysis on major ongoing stories. Robert Bikel has joined Fortune as the showrunner and Ellie Austin, a Fortune editorial director, will host.

A daily show is a good vehicle for getting more journalists in front of the camera, Banicki said. Different reporters from the newsroom will drop in as co-hosts to talk about their reporting. Banicki previously ran the “Journalist as Creators” program, a YouTube and Wall Street Journal partnership that ended in 2024.

“All journalists in newsrooms need to be creator-forward,” Banicki said. “We’ve done a number of calculated tests with reporters on camera.”

Some journalists more naturally transform into video correspondents than others, he said. “Sometimes you put people on and they’re not that great. But that’s sort of the fun right now, finding who are the journalists as creators.”

What he looks for, Banicki said, is a journalist who can tell a story in a digestible way.

“Why are creators having so much success right now? It’s because they’re building that relationship and trust with their audience. And at a time where publishers have struggled to do that the last few years, I think these formats help with that,” Banicki said.

The Economist is also working to get more reporters on camera. More than 90 journalists have appeared in its short-form videos in the past two years, said Liv Moloney, head of video at The Economist. But the publisher hasn’t adopted a formal training process. Instead, it works with the reporters who already feel comfortable on camera, and gives them more opportunities to appear in video. Last fall, it launched The Economist Insider, a long-form, subscriber-only video platform that produces two video shows a week.

“We kind of bend to whatever works for people, making people feel comfortable on camera,” Moloney said. “We did 50 pilots before we launched Insider… We practice on an ongoing basis. There’s no formal training process. It’s a constant evolution of making people feel comfortable.”

Nic Newman, senior research associate at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said this push to train newsrooms in video is part of a larger strategic move from chasing reach to building relationships.

“The money is not really in reach anymore, for all kinds of reasons, because the platforms are taking a lot of the percentages of that. So it’s, how do you build stronger, deeper relationships? Ultimately, whether that’s through subscription or other kinds of income generation, this is where sustainable media is going to come from,” Newman said. 

The challenge now, Newman added, is building those relationships on social and video platforms without becoming overly reliant on them for audience and monetization. A key reason some publishers, like The Economist, are keeping parts of their video strategy behind the paywall as a subscriber incentive.

“It’s a much more varied strategy,” Newman said.