What We Do
VC STUDIOS
Video Consortium's advising and producing arm.
Looking to reach younger audiences? Find the best visual talent? Take a creator-first strategy from within your newsroom? Show your readers who your journalists really are? Get comfortable with vertical video? Start a video podcast? Move your reporting to people's everyday feeds — and get them to stop scrolling? Pair long-form text with short documentaries? Turn your reporting into a cinematic series? We’ve got you.
Work with us.
Strategic Advising: Video Consortium offers strategic advising to help organizations meet their visual goals. This can take various forms, from meeting with C-Suite/executive teams for big picture thought partnership to co-strategizing video-first programming that meets audiences where they are.Â
1:1 Coaching: VC matches newsroom staff with aligned video coaches — drawing from our vast and talented creative membership — for ongoing support to work through bringing stories to life, from pre-production (e.g. script-writing and planning) to production (filming and getting reporters comfortable in front of the camera) to post-production (honing editing techniques and animation) and publishing (Youtube strategy and digging into analytics). Coaches are selected by the VC team based on your organization's skillset needs and, if desired, geographic proximity.
Talent Discovery:Â VC's vetted community network spans 750 cities and 80 countries, and our members are superb. As a talent matchmaker, we want to help you find the right fit for your open positions, and we want to help our members settle into exciting roles that put their skills to use.Â
Collaborative Producing:Â For special projects, talk to us about actively collaborating to bring your visual project to life.
Fees are based on a sliding scale system, depending on organization size and budget.
What Leaders Say
Here's what folks who've worked with us are saying. You heard it from the source!
[This] was transformative for our organization because it provided the practical training we needed to sustainably create the capacity for video production in our newsrooms. Our journalists quickly learned how to translate their reporting into formats that exponentially increased audience reach and impact in the communities we serve.
We have made great connections with other newsrooms that proved to be valuable in giving us a broader idea of what vertical video in a newsroom could/should look like, as well as being able to discuss differences in audiences and content and how to adapt strategies for different areas and environments.
We’ve had positive feedback from our media partners and they are looking forward to learning from us. We help provide news for a collective of 33 media outlets in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and they are extremely excited to incorporate this approach into their newsrooms. We are also going to offer training this summer to our 33 media partners, and directly to 10 interns, who can then take this workflow to the newsrooms they are in — and the newsrooms are eager to embrace this streamlined video approach.
Our “Trey Way” series brought in a combined 473,000 views, over 1,800 shares, and brought in 4,400 new followers. Since that success, we've utilized these strategies to grow our videos' performance.
“The Video Consortium is best in class when it comes to understanding how to produce compelling video journalism and documentary film in partnership with local newsrooms."
— Duc Luu, Director of Sustainability Initiatives/Journalism, Knight Foundation
Why Video?
Video is the most powerful tool we have to engage and inform; it delivers authentic, intimate, and emotionally captivating stories that go beyond images and words. It's also, now, the main way that audiences consume information.
As your organization explores new ways to amplify your stories or advance local journalism in the digital age, video is an unmatched medium for expanding your audience and reaching the communities you serve. Unsure how or where to start? Talk to us.
