The average Ugandan now meets the day’s news vertically — a sixty-second clip between everything else fighting for attention. The question for newsrooms is not whether to be there, but how to be good there.
Done badly, short-form video is noise: headlines shouted over stock footage. Done well, it is the most efficient explainer journalism has ever produced — one idea, one minute, zero padding.
The craft is more demanding than it looks. Scripts are rewritten a dozen times; every frame must earn its second; corrections travel as fast as the original error.
Berli Media’s approach is to treat the clip as the start of the story, not the summary: every short links to the full reporting for viewers who want depth.
“Vertical video was supposed to dumb the news down. Instead, the best young journalists are using it to…”
The format will keep changing. The discipline underneath it — accuracy, clarity, respect for the viewer’s time — does not.
