[Inside the Newsroom] It doesn’t have to be video vs ‘real’ community

It’s 11 pm as I write this. I have just replied to a tipster. I’m an advocate of work-life balance nowadays, but I replied to honor the courage it must have taken a person to send to a journalist information that is potentially traceable to them. They are the third tipster I have talked to today. That’s been my life since August — replying to tips, putting them in my Excel sheet, and looking at my ever-growing list of pending stories.

Hi, I’m Lian Buan, Rappler senior reporter currently very busy investigating the infrastructure scandal that’s hit the Philippines.

It’s been overwhelming, but I can’t complain. The tips have not only made my job easier, but more meaningful. Our reportage has become almost entirely citizen-powered, propelled by information we verified from mostly anonymous sources. Across our computer and phone screens, Rappler has built a community that, behind pen names and burner accounts, exposed the country’s “politicontractors,” some of whom are now being investigated by the Ombudsman.

I can confidently say that this happened because Rappler went heavy on short-form vertical videos. My network of sources has grown tenfold since last year when I started doing the Inside Track series (or what viewers remember as “What’s the tea?”). I say that because public officials who before wouldn’t even respond to any of my messages would now seek me out because they watched my video somewhere. 

I say that even as I was one of the most resistant when our editors announced our pivot to video earlier this year. I was resistant not because I didn’t believe it was the right call, but because the pivot would entail that reporters would now write, shoot, and edit our own vertical videos, on top of the already demanding workload on such a small team. 

But we persevere because the payoff has been very quantifiable. 

Nieman Lab has recently been putting out thought-provoking forecasts on journalism for 2026, and something that triggered me quite a bit was Tracie Powell’s “Journalism’s influencer obsession will age poorly.” She wrote: “Journalism will look back on its influencer mania the way it now views the ‘pivot to video’ — as a costly diversion from building real community structure.”

We take exception to that prediction because our pivot to video has led us exactly toward building real community structures. There is no point having to pit one format (long-form) against another (short-format verticals). First, because they can exist alongside each other. Our vertical videos are derivatives of our long-form products, so there is still something for those who like reading a long piece.

There also has to be clarification on what we mean by short form. For me, “short form” means, from its root word, a format. It is, as we like to say in our newsroom group chat, a “quick and dirty” video product as compared to the polished post-produced format of a documentary, for example. But it’s just a format — it’s never about the quality of content. Our short-form videos are products of a story that we investigated for weeks or even months. 

The real critique here is not whether journalists have succumbed to the algorithmic demand, but whether journalists have worked hard enough to find the unique stories that can compete for the short attention spans of the doomscrollers.

Our videos, I was told, should not exceed more than three minutes. I violate that all the time. You know how long one of my most-watched short-form videos is? Eight minutes and nine seconds — 2.7 million views on Instagram, 2.3 million views on TikTok, and 260,000 views on YouTube. That’s for a long “short form” about the process by which infrastructure projects are corrupted — from preparing the budget, to delivering boxes of cash. People have come up to me to say they’ve learned from those series of videos what NEP (National Expenditure Program) means, and why UA (unprogrammed appropriations) are suspect.

Would they have read the story if it were exclusively text? Maybe, maybe not. In this post-truth era, I wouldn’t want to gamble on a maybe, I would rather go quick and dirty on Capcut to reduce the maybe not.

I would rather get cracking on my Excel sheet than spend my time theorizing on whether my short forms have cheapened the art of writing.

What I resonate with in Powell’s Nieman piece is this: She said that audiences will shift to human-created spaces where authenticity is the center, and influencers would soon be irrelevant. I agree, but I’ve never been an influencer. I just tried to sound like one.

When we do shift to that human-created space, I’m ready to move and adjust once more, with the community we have built while being cringe. – Rappler.com