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The New York Times has hired eight new journalists for its video department, the news organization announced today. Another 14 video-related roles remain open.
The new hires include Robert Libetti (2025 Nieman fellow), the former head of documentaries at Brut America, two video producers previously at Vice News, and a short-form video journalist from The Boston Globe.
A decade after the much-ballyhooed “pivot to video,” news publishers are increasingly embracing vertical video with in-app “watch” tabs and homepage features, as Nieman Lab staff writer Hanaa’ Tameez has chronicled. Several Nieman Lab Predictions for Journalism 2026 anticipated even more (especially short-form) video in the new year.
One of the world’s most successful news companies seems to think it’s the right direction. With controversial culture desk changes, the Times marked a shift from “text-based reviews to more personal, video-driven tastemaking for the TikTok age,” as Semafor reported last year. It’s also made moves to transform its podcast hosts into video stars.
New York Times tech journalist and Hard Fork cohost Kevin Roose recently shared his resolution for 2026 is to “get good at short-form video.” (If it’s yours, too, there’s an app for that.) Roose mentioned Derek Thompson’s popular “Everything is television” piece and explained:
Every social media experience is now becoming dominated by video and specifically short-form video. And I have been observing this from afar for several years, feeling like, oh, someone should actually get good at this, who is a journalist.
Because the people who are good at it are generally not journalists. The people who are going viral on these platforms are generally not doing it because they want to get good, accurate true information out into the world. There’s a lot of low-quality, short-form video out there.
And so I think a lot of journalists have been kind of repelled by the whole medium, because this is not a place where serious people go to do serious things. At least it doesn’t seem that way from the outside. This is like a place for goofy, ragebait, and stunts and people trying to go viral by doing catering to the lowest common denominator.
And I understand that reaction. I have very ambivalent feelings about the rise of short-form video as a replacement for text. We are people of the word. We are writers.
But I do think this is something that I expect to continue. I think that we are learning that there are just many more people in the world who like getting their news and information in the form of short videos than in the form of 1,200-word newspaper articles.
Read the new hires announcement here.
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