Stacey Woelfel spent 35 years on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism.
And for 24 years, he was the news director for KOMU, the University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate for central Missouri.
News Blues does accept submissions for Guest Commentaries, but we reserve the right to publish or edit them. Send your commentary to Paul@NewsBlues.com
A Twist of the Wrist is the Gist of How We’ll Exist
Choosing the right direction for the future of TV news may be more literal than you think.
I’m back in Columbia for a few weeks, playing host to recruiters from many local TV ownership groups in town to meet with and interview Mizzou journalism students for jobs at their companies. I enjoy these visits immensely, both as a chance to meet students and give them advice for their jobs hunts, but also as a time to talk with colleagues still working in the industry and stay up to date on the latest trends. I’ve had three companies in so far this semester and the two-word phrase I keep hearing over and over again is…”vertical video.”
In the battle to win (or just keep) viewers, vertical video is leading the charge.
It only makes sense that television stations, which have been trying to find the best path to reach people on their mobile devices for decades now, see that people like to consume video vertically. After all, that’s how we hold our phones most of the time. And the apps that are feeding us much of our daily video content each day—Instagram, TikTok, YouTube—are quick to deliver videos vertically to keep us scrolling.
Those who have been in TV for a long time know this plea for reporters who can deliver content in vertical form is a far cry from our original push when smartphones hit the market. Suddenly, everyone was constantly carrying around broadcast-quality cameras in their pockets, so we wanted them to send in clips they captured that we could use on the news. “See news happen? Snap it, share it, send it!” was the promo that ran on KOMU-TV while I was news director. We were actively recruiting viewers to provide what would come to be called user-generated content, UGC. Aside from sending these clips to us, we asked viewers to do one more thing for us—shoot the video horizontally on their phones. It only made sense. Our broadcast video was in the process of moving from the nearly square 4:3 format to the decidedly horizontal 16:9 aspect ratio. That supported the new HD broadcasts we had begun airing and gave television a more cinematic look, coming close to the standard movie aspect ratio of 1.85:1 (by comparison, TV’s 16:9 translates to 1.78:1 in cinema terms). With our new widescreen newscasts, vertical videos looked just plain ugly on TV, leaving miles of room on either side of the image and shrinking the important content beyond recognition in some cases.
The smartphone’s rise to prominence in the mid-2000s would have more impact on TV news than just viewer videos.
From the mid-2000s on—particularly with the launch of the iPhone in 2007—nearly every pocket, purse and palm carried a device that could shoot and display high-quality video. Users were constantly shooting video and sending it to others—including local TV stations. But they were spending a lot more time watching videos than producing them. It soon became clear that holding the phone in one hand to watch a video in vertical mode was far more comfortable than holding it in two hands to watch in horizontal mode. People started to casually shoot and share their videos vertically, moving away from the horizontal video that they had been doing. Then, in 2017, came TikTok. Vertical videos were the entire purpose of the new platform and young people adopted it so rapidly the rest of the mobile photo and video sharing world took notice. Facebook and Instagram—themselves primarily still image platforms at the time—introduced “Reels” and “Stories” as a way to share video—vertical video—more readily. YouTube, long the supplier of most of the world’s horizontal videos played on mobile devices, set up its own vertical video format with “Shorts” in 2021, flexing its muscles to reach its nearly 3 billion monthly users. These additions to the social media landscape cemented vertical video as the go-to way for younger people to see and share videos. But the more traditional news and entertainment world was still miles behind.
Enter Quibi—the right platform at the wrong time.
I don’t know how many people reading this subscribed to Quibi back in 2020, but I know it wasn’t very many of you. That’s because this video entertainment channel—made specifically to watch vertically on your phone—lasted only about six months and garnered only half a million subscribers over its short life. I was one of those few subscribers and found the concept and execution of the platform to be brilliant. While the main version of the app was designed to deliver vertical videos, if you turned your phone horizontally the aspect ratio would change and what you saw in the video would actually change, too,with no need for letterbox or pillarbox masks. The content was the perfect length (less than ten minutes each) to watch in small bits vertically on the phone, with longer programs cut into multiple parts to watch one at a time or all in a row. Quibi took the staples of entertainment television to create its content—comedies, dramas, sports and yes, news and documentary—though news did not do very well on the platform compared with entertainment programming. Many saw the app as a handy diversion from the stress of the day, so news probably didn’t serve that purpose as well as a reboot of Reno 911! did.
We’ve entered a time when our focus on news coverage must be to do it vertically.
The now instinctual nature of watching short vertical videos on our phones, combined with the move toward increased delivery of news to mobile devices, tells us something about the future of streamed news and entertainment. Fewer and fewer audience members are sitting down on their couches to watch live TV news at 6 pm. Anyone I talk to under 60 seldom does this now. Younger people don’t do it at all. TV news can reach more of these potential viewers by putting out native vertical videos to include in their media mix. By “native,” I means videos entirely conceived, shot and edited vertically for vertical distribution in short segments that would be appropriate for TikTok or Instagram Reels. Interviews, standups and live shots are the first elements of the stories that will fare better in vertical mode. Widescreen shots have never been the best way to capture people, who are, after all, essentially vertical themselves. Beyond capturing people in a more appropriate way, journalists assigned to shooting vertical video and editing vertical stories should have that as the primary focus of their work days, with picking up horizontal video for broadcast a secondary priority.=
I’m calling this vertical-first approach “Vertical News Gathering” or VNG (an homage to the days we moved from film to videotape in the field and had to coin the term Electronic News Gathering or ENG). Just as a digital-first approach to delivering news changed our workflows drastically as we started to publish stories online before they went to air, VNG will change the workflow in our newsrooms to provide an abundant stream of content to users on their phones throughout the day. Facebook and Instagram Reels are probably the best place to deliver this content, with their three-minute time limit plenty long enough to carry short news segments. TikTok can go up to ten minutes, though shorter will be better. It might even be wise to cut longer packages into two or more pieces for people to consume just a bit at a time.
We’re headed for two paths on which to receive our videos.
The way in which we will receive news, information programming and most forms of entertainment will almost certainly move nearly exclusively to vertical video. This content is best suited for watching in shorter stints, consuming while doing other things and generally viewing it as a commodity that can come from many different sources. The word “commodity” is scary for any local newsroom to see, as it means our content is no more valuable to the viewer than someone else’s. But look at the streaming world now—there are “brand names” in the content production space that surpass the commodity stage and become this generation’s version of “Must-See TV.” Local TV newsrooms have the power to reach that level if they embrace the technology and understand the audience. VNG is the first step to domination in that arena
The other path on which we will receive very specific content will remain horizontal or—perhaps the word I should have been using all along—“cinematic.” Cinemas are the places where the widescreen, horizontal picture remains sacred and essential. Content that has the heft and importance of cinema will remain best consumed in that manner. News, sadly, is not in that category for most people, but cinematic nonfiction is. That includes documentaries that feel like you’re watching a movie and information programs that wow the viewer with striking visuals and audio. Our newsrooms may produce some of that sort of content, but it’s not key to our future in the same way content generated by VNG will be.
While we’re used to sitting and watching a horizontal, 16:9 picture on our televisions at home, I can see a day not so far off at which we have two types of TVs (monitors, really) in our homes. Vertical monitors, placed in every room around our houses, will carry entertainment, news and information either streamed from our phones or played on their own apps. These ubiquitous home screens will carry most of what we watch when not looking at our phones. Then, in one or two special places, we’ll find the cinema displays. They’ll be like the widescreen televisions on which we’ll view most home television now—but on steroids. Bigger, louder, more vivid and more cinema-like, they’ll be where we sit to watch the classy, significant and beautiful stuff. It’s probably not that far off to think of truly smart TVs that can change their shape and size to match the content they are streaming, physically morphing into a vertical monitor for that content or into a massively wide cinema screen when displaying films.
Even as we wait for a technological marvel that will change its shape to suit our viewing modes, we should remember we have one already. That phone in your hand converts from a widescreen cinema viewer to a vertical video viewer with just a twist of your wrist. Now is the time for newsrooms to realize they need to make the same change of perspective in what they’re delivering to their audiences to be sure we still exist when technology—and personal preferences—put an end to our boring, horizontal newscasts.
- Guest Commentary
February 27, 2026A Twist of the Wrist is the Gist of How We’ll Exist
By Paul Greeley
817-578-6324, Paul@NewsBlues.com
NOTE: This is from Stacey Woelfel’s Substack column, The Last Editor by Stacey Woelfel.
Stacey Woelfel spent 35 years on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism.
And for 24 years, he was the news director for KOMU, the University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate for central Missouri.
News Blues does accept submissions for Guest Commentaries, but we reserve the right to publish or edit them. Send your commentary to Paul@NewsBlues.com
A Twist of the Wrist is the Gist of How We’ll Exist
Choosing the right direction for the future of TV news may be more literal than you think.
I’m back in Columbia for a few weeks, playing host to recruiters from many local TV ownership groups in town to meet with and interview Mizzou journalism students for jobs at their companies. I enjoy these visits immensely, both as a chance to meet students and give them advice for their jobs hunts, but also as a time to talk with colleagues still working in the industry and stay up to date on the latest trends. I’ve had three companies in so far this semester and the two-word phrase I keep hearing over and over again is…”vertical video.”
In the battle to win (or just keep) viewers, vertical video is leading the charge.
It only makes sense that television stations, which have been trying to find the best path to reach people on their mobile devices for decades now, see that people like to consume video vertically. After all, that’s how we hold our phones most of the time. And the apps that are feeding us much of our daily video content each day—Instagram, TikTok, YouTube—are quick to deliver videos vertically to keep us scrolling.
Those who have been in TV for a long time know this plea for reporters who can deliver content in vertical form is a far cry from our original push when smartphones hit the market. Suddenly, everyone was constantly carrying around broadcast-quality cameras in their pockets, so we wanted them to send in clips they captured that we could use on the news. “See news happen? Snap it, share it, send it!” was the promo that ran on KOMU-TV while I was news director. We were actively recruiting viewers to provide what would come to be called user-generated content, UGC. Aside from sending these clips to us, we asked viewers to do one more thing for us—shoot the video horizontally on their phones. It only made sense. Our broadcast video was in the process of moving from the nearly square 4:3 format to the decidedly horizontal 16:9 aspect ratio. That supported the new HD broadcasts we had begun airing and gave television a more cinematic look, coming close to the standard movie aspect ratio of 1.85:1 (by comparison, TV’s 16:9 translates to 1.78:1 in cinema terms). With our new widescreen newscasts, vertical videos looked just plain ugly on TV, leaving miles of room on either side of the image and shrinking the important content beyond recognition in some cases.
The smartphone’s rise to prominence in the mid-2000s would have more impact on TV news than just viewer videos.
From the mid-2000s on—particularly with the launch of the iPhone in 2007—nearly every pocket, purse and palm carried a device that could shoot and display high-quality video. Users were constantly shooting video and sending it to others—including local TV stations. But they were spending a lot more time watching videos than producing them. It soon became clear that holding the phone in one hand to watch a video in vertical mode was far more comfortable than holding it in two hands to watch in horizontal mode. People started to casually shoot and share their videos vertically, moving away from the horizontal video that they had been doing. Then, in 2017, came TikTok. Vertical videos were the entire purpose of the new platform and young people adopted it so rapidly the rest of the mobile photo and video sharing world took notice. Facebook and Instagram—themselves primarily still image platforms at the time—introduced “Reels” and “Stories” as a way to share video—vertical video—more readily. YouTube, long the supplier of most of the world’s horizontal videos played on mobile devices, set up its own vertical video format with “Shorts” in 2021, flexing its muscles to reach its nearly 3 billion monthly users. These additions to the social media landscape cemented vertical video as the go-to way for younger people to see and share videos. But the more traditional news and entertainment world was still miles behind.
Enter Quibi—the right platform at the wrong time.
I don’t know how many people reading this subscribed to Quibi back in 2020, but I know it wasn’t very many of you. That’s because this video entertainment channel—made specifically to watch vertically on your phone—lasted only about six months and garnered only half a million subscribers over its short life. I was one of those few subscribers and found the concept and execution of the platform to be brilliant. While the main version of the app was designed to deliver vertical videos, if you turned your phone horizontally the aspect ratio would change and what you saw in the video would actually change, too,with no need for letterbox or pillarbox masks. The content was the perfect length (less than ten minutes each) to watch in small bits vertically on the phone, with longer programs cut into multiple parts to watch one at a time or all in a row. Quibi took the staples of entertainment television to create its content—comedies, dramas, sports and yes, news and documentary—though news did not do very well on the platform compared with entertainment programming. Many saw the app as a handy diversion from the stress of the day, so news probably didn’t serve that purpose as well as a reboot of Reno 911! did.
We’ve entered a time when our focus on news coverage must be to do it vertically.
The now instinctual nature of watching short vertical videos on our phones, combined with the move toward increased delivery of news to mobile devices, tells us something about the future of streamed news and entertainment. Fewer and fewer audience members are sitting down on their couches to watch live TV news at 6 pm. Anyone I talk to under 60 seldom does this now. Younger people don’t do it at all. TV news can reach more of these potential viewers by putting out native vertical videos to include in their media mix. By “native,” I means videos entirely conceived, shot and edited vertically for vertical distribution in short segments that would be appropriate for TikTok or Instagram Reels. Interviews, standups and live shots are the first elements of the stories that will fare better in vertical mode. Widescreen shots have never been the best way to capture people, who are, after all, essentially vertical themselves. Beyond capturing people in a more appropriate way, journalists assigned to shooting vertical video and editing vertical stories should have that as the primary focus of their work days, with picking up horizontal video for broadcast a secondary priority.=
I’m calling this vertical-first approach “Vertical News Gathering” or VNG (an homage to the days we moved from film to videotape in the field and had to coin the term Electronic News Gathering or ENG). Just as a digital-first approach to delivering news changed our workflows drastically as we started to publish stories online before they went to air, VNG will change the workflow in our newsrooms to provide an abundant stream of content to users on their phones throughout the day. Facebook and Instagram Reels are probably the best place to deliver this content, with their three-minute time limit plenty long enough to carry short news segments. TikTok can go up to ten minutes, though shorter will be better. It might even be wise to cut longer packages into two or more pieces for people to consume just a bit at a time.
We’re headed for two paths on which to receive our videos.
The way in which we will receive news, information programming and most forms of entertainment will almost certainly move nearly exclusively to vertical video. This content is best suited for watching in shorter stints, consuming while doing other things and generally viewing it as a commodity that can come from many different sources. The word “commodity” is scary for any local newsroom to see, as it means our content is no more valuable to the viewer than someone else’s. But look at the streaming world now—there are “brand names” in the content production space that surpass the commodity stage and become this generation’s version of “Must-See TV.” Local TV newsrooms have the power to reach that level if they embrace the technology and understand the audience. VNG is the first step to domination in that arena
The other path on which we will receive very specific content will remain horizontal or—perhaps the word I should have been using all along—“cinematic.” Cinemas are the places where the widescreen, horizontal picture remains sacred and essential. Content that has the heft and importance of cinema will remain best consumed in that manner. News, sadly, is not in that category for most people, but cinematic nonfiction is. That includes documentaries that feel like you’re watching a movie and information programs that wow the viewer with striking visuals and audio. Our newsrooms may produce some of that sort of content, but it’s not key to our future in the same way content generated by VNG will be.
While we’re used to sitting and watching a horizontal, 16:9 picture on our televisions at home, I can see a day not so far off at which we have two types of TVs (monitors, really) in our homes. Vertical monitors, placed in every room around our houses, will carry entertainment, news and information either streamed from our phones or played on their own apps. These ubiquitous home screens will carry most of what we watch when not looking at our phones. Then, in one or two special places, we’ll find the cinema displays. They’ll be like the widescreen televisions on which we’ll view most home television now—but on steroids. Bigger, louder, more vivid and more cinema-like, they’ll be where we sit to watch the classy, significant and beautiful stuff. It’s probably not that far off to think of truly smart TVs that can change their shape and size to match the content they are streaming, physically morphing into a vertical monitor for that content or into a massively wide cinema screen when displaying films.
Even as we wait for a technological marvel that will change its shape to suit our viewing modes, we should remember we have one already. That phone in your hand converts from a widescreen cinema viewer to a vertical video viewer with just a twist of your wrist. Now is the time for newsrooms to realize they need to make the same change of perspective in what they’re delivering to their audiences to be sure we still exist when technology—and personal preferences—put an end to our boring, horizontal newscasts.
WANTED: Assistant Local TV News Director, NEW AS OF 2.21
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