Vine shifts from comedy clips to a valid journalistic tool

Just before Channel 4 News’s chief correspondent Alex Thomson set off on a reporting assignment to Ebola-hit Sierra Leone earlier this month, one of the show’s digital producers pulled him aside and suggested he should “do some Vines” while he was there. “I looked at him blankly,” says Thomson. “Images of vineyards floated into my head.”

Vine is a video sharing app that allows a user to film and edit six-second clips, which loop continuously, and post them online. It was founded in June 2012 and was bought by Twitter in October the same year. It now claims 100 million people are watching Vines each month.

Although it is still mainly used for visual gags and comedy – France’s Jerome Jarre, for example, has more than 7 million followers and has turned comedy “Vining” into a career – Vine is becoming an increasingly popular journalistic reporting tool.

In recent months Vines have been used to report on stories from the riots in Ferguson and the Scottish referendum to last week’s student protests in London. Video filmed in the app is low resolution and, obviously, very short, so the video file is small and can be uploaded to the internet with a relatively weak connection.

Thomson’s Vines from Sierra Leone caused a stir on Twitter. People weren’t used to seeing six-second snatches of video, usually reserved for comedy, being used to document such serious subject matter. But his use of Vines to record snapshots of the situation seemed to work – “Your coverage of the Ebola outbreak has been fantastic. I understand the situation much better because of it”, one Twitter user tweeted to Thomson.

One of Thomson’s Vines shows a man looking into the camera, which then pans around to show a woman lying on a stretcher on the ground. Thomson’s voice can be heard explaining that the man has carried his wife five miles to the hospital, only to be told they can’t take her. Another shows a scene of villagers wailing with grief: “Villagers grieve as their friend is put into the ambulance,” the voiceover says.

“Just as the tweet is the boiled-down version of the blog post, which is the boiled-down version of the essay, a Vine is the boiled-down version of a TV package, which is a boiled-down version of a documentary,” says Marc Blank-Settle, a mobile journalism and social media trainer at the BBC College of Journalism. “The tool itself is brilliantly easy to use. It’s really leveraging the power of Twitter to share news and information very quickly.”

Nic Newman, a research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, says that, just as they did with Twitter, journalists are starting to experiment with the medium: “When something new comes along people experiment with it and figure out what works well and they develop conventions. It was the same when television news came along … fundamentally news packages haven’t changed for years.

“When people started experimenting with Twitter there were a lot of mistakes or conventions broken and feathers ruffled,” he says. “But part of that experimentation phase is working out where the boundaries are.”

Research shows the way audiences consume news is changing dramatically as a result of the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. Newman describes the new way of consuming the news as “snacking”: “Rather than sitting down at a prearranged time, what the internet has done is enabled you to be in control of [when you look at the news]. People tend to snatch bits of news in their lunch breaks or at a bus stop.”

This means that audiences are much less likely to give you their full attention, he says. “In the past you didn’t need to fight for attention in the same way and now all kinds of media are converging and competing with each other, so really you’re in an attention economy.” Blank-Settle says that journalists should beware of attempting to do too much in six seconds: “In journalism there’s always the tradeoff between what you want to say in the story and the time you have to say it. Six seconds is barely 20 words. A journalist who tries to summarise a story in a Vine is on much shakier ground than a journalist who might use it to show one aspect of a story.”

Thomson says he found it a useful tool to show another side of the situation in Sierra Leone: “You can’t show on a [TV news package] that Sierra Leone is actually a very beautiful country, but you can if you stick the phone out the window as you’re going across some virgin forest with a magnificent river … that would be wholly inappropriate in a news feature where you’re showing somebody dying of a horrible disease. So [Vine has] all sorts of potential to fill in the wider framework.”

“At the end of the day journalists are attention seekers,” adds Thomson, “especially with a story like [Ebola]. You want people to take notice and be interested and I don’t care if people are interested in five and a half minutes of [a TV news package] on a news programme like Channel 4 News or whether they’re going to go for six seconds. I care about them making the journey.”