Short videos on social networks such as Vine are becoming common tools for journalism

Over the past several years, short videos have become a vital part of social media. The best evidence of this is the rapid explosion of Vine, which is devoted entirely to looping videos with a six-second maximum. The network launched in January 2013; before long, Vines (the unofficial title given to the video clips themselves) were a staple across social media. This has been the case ever since.

Vine's logo (source: LogoSpike.com)

Today, Vine is one of the most prominent social media video outlets, although both Twitter and Instagram also have similar services of their own. These networks have gained a reputation as a useful tool not only for comedy and entertainment, but for journalism, as well. In a media culture that demands immediacy more than ever before, brief video clips are rapidly becoming more appealing to news and sports reporters alike.

Vines can capture lots of action and emotion in little time

Among the earliest cases of Vine journalism occurred in February 2013. After a suicide bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Turkey, Al-Monitor columnist Tulin Daloglu used it to capture the aftermath. Her clips showed certain areas taped off, as well as large crowds standing in confusion. Viewers could also make out stretchers and ambulances in the background. Daloglu posted the Vines on Turkey Pulse, which is Al-Monitor's Turkey-specific Twitter feed.

In November 2014, Channel 4 news correspondent Alex Thomson went out to Ebola-stricken Sierra Leone. One of the show's digital producers told him to "do some Vines." He did, and although Vine isn't known for documenting heavy subjects, his use of it was well received. One video featured a group of villagers grieving as somebody was loaded into an ambulance; another, a man who had carried his sick wife five miles to a hospital that wouldn't take her in. Viewers could, to a certain extent, empathize with those in the village. Thomson also voiced over his footage, as if it were background footage in a newscast.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Journalists have a long history of experimenting with new platforms. Social media is the newest and perhaps the most prominent example, but this has been the case regarding television, radio and even the telegraph. Ira Chinoy, who teaches Journalism History at the University of Maryland, says that it's natural for storytellers to be on the lookout for new means of sending out information.

"Every time some kind of new medium or platform comes up, there are people who will tend to experiment with it for storytelling and for news," he says. "It's not surprising at all that people who want to tell news and share stories would experiment with all the social media platforms to see how they work as news platforms."

Of course, not everyone who has taken advantage of these outlets is a journalist by trade. Thanks in part to the relative ease of recording and posting these videos, there is a greater prevalence of citizen journalism. When protest broke out last summer in Ferguson, many on the scene shared the happenings with the world via Vine. Both credentialed media members with expensive cameras and bystanders with cell phone cameras had a voice. When police forces gave the journalists a hard time, citizens were there to document that.

In October 2015, an incident at a South Carolina high school became national news in large part because a student uploaded a video to Instagram. The clip showed officer Ben Fields attempting to forcibly remove a student from her seat, flipping over her desk in the process. She had allegedly been disruptive in class and was asked multiple times to leave, but the video only showed Fields' extreme reaction. He is currently on unpaid leave.

This saga exposes both positive and negative consequences of video clips on social networks becoming news reports. One one hand, the video helped an incident that most likely would not have garnered national attention to do so. On the other, the fact that it only showed Fields' actions and not the preceding events may have distorted public opinion regarding the incident.

Perhaps it is the case that videos of such short duration aren't enough to tell an entire story; rather, they function best as a supplement.

"I would have to be convinced that you could tell a whole story in six seconds, but that [Vines and similar videos] would be a valuable part of a story, absolutely," Chinoy says. "If you think about how a newscast is put together, it's often a set of scenes that are two, three, four seconds short. So why not have that be part of a multimedia presentation?"

Sports highlights are more accessible now than ever before

The shift toward immediate information also impacts how certain sports journalists do their jobs. Reporters can often be found live-tweeting to update their followers, and some are also using Vines and Twitter videos to capture big moments on the field.

Last winter, I used Vines to supplement my coverage of my high school's boys' basketball team. I had seen Washington Post high school reporter Chelsea Janes (who now covers the Washington Nationals) post a few Vines of scoring plays at various football games, and decided to experiment with the app myself. I generally posted between four and six Vines per game, and would post them on Twitter to supplement the text-only periodic updates.

It wasn't easy. Because the clips only ran for six seconds, I had to develop a sense for when a player would take a shot. If he missed, I would delete the video and start over. Towards the end of a close game, I would try to record as many plays as I could. The recording prospects dictated where I sat in the stands. I wanted to be high up enough that my view of the play wouldn't be obstructed by officials, coaches or players, but low enough to still get the shot. Every gym was a little different, but I was able to adjust. I like to think putting out clips like these helped keep people up to date on the happenings of the game.



Instagram video doesn't suit this purpose as much. The site still consists predominantly of photos and doesn't update as constantly as other social networks. In January 2015, meanwhile, Twitter added a native video service with a 30-second limit. While I personally have yet to use this for game coverage, I've seen several fellow reporters do so. It seems to work very well for football. One can simply start recording as the team lines up and record an entire play. It might not work as well for basketball, however, as most noteworthy plays can still fit in a Vine.

A good amount of sports highlights are presented as Vines. Sometimes, people watching the game at home simply record a play on their TV, then send a video out. However, professional sites such as SB Nation or Bleacher Report are able to produce them in high quality, then tweet them to the general public.

From there, anyone can use Adobe Premier or a similar video editing software to put a new spin on the play. University of Maryland junior Kofie Yeboah does this, and one of his creations was recently featured on SportsCenter.

To put together a Vine in which Detroit Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson disappears into a pipe in Super Mario-esque fashion, Yeboah simply placed PNG images on the video, then added sound effects from the video game. Within a few minutes, the video was on Vine and shared to Twitter. In this and many other cases, Vine is the primary means by which a highlight play sweeps across social media. It captures Steph Curry circus shots, Odell Beckham one-handed catches, Jose Bautista bat flips, and much more.

Videos are becoming a more integral part of social media

In July 2013, after Vine had reached 13 million users in its first six months, Instagram unveiled a new video feature. The selling points: a 15-second limit and 13 video-only filters. It was no secret that the plan was to compete with Vine. Facebook owns Instagram, while Twitter owns Vine.

Source: mattnazario.tumblr.com

At the time, some thought that Instagram video would make Vine obsolete, but the latter quickly responded with new features of its own, such as the ability to save drafts and splice clips from multiple Vines together. One major advantage Vine still holds over Instagram is that its clips can be embedded in other stories (like this one). Even though it has fewer users, the network has continued to gain popularity over the past few years.

For the reasons mentioned earlier, Vines and Twitter videos are more commonly used as journalistic tools than Instagram videos. Lots of people still use Instagram video to tell their story; it's just rare to see someone post several of them in a short time frame.

As recently as three years ago, one couldn't view a picture on Twitter without leaving the timeline. Today, photos and videos make up a hefty portion of the site. There are predictions that by 2017, two thirds of all mobile traffic will be video. People love to watch things, and the success of several video-based social networks is strong evidence.

Vine uses 6-second videos that loop

In an August 2013 interview with NPR's Laura Sydell, co-founder Dom Hofmann explained that before settling on six seconds, he and the network's other co-founders (Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov) first experimented with ten, nine and five. After settling on six, though, they added a loop because they felt videos ended too quickly.

"The next thing that we noticed was that the videos start quickly but they also end very quickly and that felt anti-climactic," Hoffmann said. "It didn't feel right."

The looping feature often leads to viewers watching a video multiple times at once. It is not entirely dissimilar to GIFs, which have also risen to prominence across the web in recent years. (GIFs were actually developed in 1987, but have taken off now that most social networks support them.) Some users make "infinite" videos, in which the image at the beginning and end of the loop is the same, but even clips that don't are often viewed more than once.

"You don't just skip a six-second video, so you watch it," said Pierre Laromiguiere, president of a marketing company that uses Vine. "And when you like it or there's anything in it that appeals to you, you appear to watch it like three, four, five, six times in a row."

With features like these, it's understandable why journalists use the network to tell their stories. From stadiums to streets to villages, it seems as though there's always someone capturing the moment with a cell phone. Just maybe, you'll be able to replay that moment on loop forever.