u/VeterinarianOne1433

I'm really enjoying getting back into daily video editing and flexing a muscle I've not had a chance to really push and challenge myself with.

And one of the more enjoyable videos I've made over the last few months actually happened last week, where I looked at the history of the Royal Film Performance. I had no idea that in 1946 there was such commotion in the West End of London that the Metropolitan Police had to deploy mounted officers to keep the crowds under control so the Royal Family could enter the cinema.

That's probably the bit I've enjoyed most about getting properly stuck into these edits again. You start with what sounds like a relatively straightforward idea, then disappear down a rabbit hole and find a story, an image or a piece of footage you had absolutely no idea existed.

It also reminds me why I enjoy editing in the first place. You're not just assembling pictures around a script. You're constantly making decisions about pace, tone, music, graphics and structure, and occasionally completely rewriting the idea because the pictures are telling you something better.

I’ve been looking at the impact Lord Mountbatten’s assassination had on the Royal Family, particularly King Charles.

Mountbatten wasn’t simply a great-uncle. He was Charles’s mentor and the man he later called “the grandfather I never had”. His untimely death came just as Charles was under growing pressure to marry and secure the succession.

Now you obviously can’t trace everything that followed back to one moment in time. But remove one of Charles’s closest advisers before his marriage to Diana, and it’s difficult not to wonder how differently the story might have unfolded?

I’ve taught and spoken to a lot of student journalists who know they’re supposed to be on LinkedIn, but aren’t entirely sure what they’re meant to do once they get there.

So I pulled together ten bits of advice based on what I’ve seen over the years, from showing what you've produced intelligently rather than just listing skills, to posting with some context, having opinions about the industry, networking like a normal human being and not writing as though you’ve been running a newsroom for 20 years when you graduated three months ago.

The basic argument is pretty simple: the point isn’t simply to be seen. It’s to be discovered.

I’d also be interested in what working journalists and recent graduates would add, disagree with or tell students to ignore completely.

Diana had been leaving the Ritz with Dodi Fayed when their car crashed while being pursued by paparazzi. What struck me was just how much happened in those few days. The scale of the public mourning, the growing anger towards the Royal Family and the row over the flag at Buckingham Palace could easily fill another documentary on their own.

It’s difficult to overstate just how enormous this story became, or how much of what happened that week still shapes the way we talk about the royals, the press and Diana today.

The way the Royal Family is educated has changed pretty dramatically in just a few generations.

Elizabeth II was taught privately at home. Charles became the first future monarch to be sent out to school rather than educated entirely inside the palace. William went through GCSEs and A-levels at Eton before university.

And now the younger generation, including James, Earl of Wessex, are following an increasingly familiar school-to-university route. Obviously, these are still some of the most privileged schools in Britain, but the shift itself is fascinating: palace lessons → O-levels → GCSEs → university.

We put together a video looking at how royal education changed from Elizabeth to Charles, William and the generations coming after them.

What do you think was the biggest change: actually going to school, sitting public exams, or university becoming almost expected?

Andrew has lost his titles, his royal role and Royal Lodge, but reports suggest one final royal privilege could remain intact. His funeral plans could reportedly include St George’s Chapel, burial at Frogmore and Royal Navy pallbearers, with questions now being raised over whether taxpayers could end up contributing to the cost. Given everything that’s happened, should he still receive a royal send-off?

What has the Reuters Digital News Report 2026 taught us? Well, in the words of a wise man:

“The times they are a-changin’.”

The era of the homepage as the gateway to news and information has been trampled underfoot by the rise of social media platforms. The audience drift away from conventional thinking and legacy formats is undeniable.

The data shows that social media and video networks are now the most widely used source of news globally, reaching 54% of audiences and pulling ahead of television at 52% and news websites and apps at 51%. Add AI chatbots into the mix and third-party platforms extend their reach even further, to 56%.

Online video is now a mainstream obsession, and the data proves it.

• 77% watched some form of online news video in the previous week.
• 69% watched news video on a social or video platform.

However, the picture is less favourable for news outlets attempting to position their apps and websites as content destinations. Only 23% watched video on a news organisation’s own website or app.

On-site video use has fallen by 10 percentage points since 2021, while viewing on social platforms has continued to rise. TikTok and Instagram recorded particularly strong growth between 2023 and 2026, while video use on publisher websites fell by five points over the same period.

>This is hardly the fall of the Roman Empire for the news industry, but the audience shift is gathering momentum year after year.

One interesting audience behaviour to emerge from the data is that younger viewers are not interested only in short-form video, which challenges a great deal of pre-existing thinking around formats.

Among 18 to 24-year-olds who watch news on YouTube, 52% watch videos longer than five minutes, compared with 41% of over-55s. Older YouTube users are actually more likely than younger users to watch short news clips.

The implication is that publishers should not treat “online video” as a single format. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have different audiences, behaviours and expectations. Short-form vertical video is important, but YouTube also provides a genuine market for longer explanations, discussions and programmes, particularly among younger viewers.

So, what does this all mean?

>Audiences haven’t stopped needing journalism, but they are increasingly finding it somewhere else. Platforms, creators and AI now shape how news is discovered, understood and trusted, often before anyone reaches a publisher’s own site.

The challenge for news publishers is no longer simply producing reports for a homepage or television bulletin and leaving it at that. It is making sure their reporting remains visible, distinctive and worth seeking out in an environment they no longer control.

And that may be the biggest challenge of all for the business of news: the control freaks are no longer masters of their own fate.

Harsh? Perhaps. Fair? Certainly.

I’ve been playing around with a short AI debate format where ChatGPT and Gemini argue through what AskYouTube and Gemini Omni could mean for news publishers.

The basic question is this: if YouTube starts giving people direct answers from video, rather than just serving them videos to choose from, what happens to the original news publisher?

>Video has often been treated as one of journalism’s escape routes from Google Zero. But AskYouTube raises a similar problem inside YouTube itself. The viewer may no longer need to click the package, watch the explainer, or visit the publisher. They may just get the answer.

Gemini Omni adds another layer to that. If platform tools can help remix, reframe and repurpose video inside the ecosystem, publishers could find themselves providing the raw material while the platform owns more of the user journey.

This is not me claiming the sky is falling. It is more a small experiment in thinking through where this might be heading, using the tools themselves to debate the problem.

Curious what people think: is this just better discovery for news video, or another step towards platforms swallowing the value of journalism?

File this one under: wait and see.

>Speaking at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille, YouTube’ vice president for Europe Pedro Pina said that “a paywall that has a conversation between YouTube and the current paywall of publishers is something that has not yet been developed, but we have product and engineers working on it.”

YouTube is making its AI labels harder to ignore. If the platform detects “significant photorealistic AI use”, it can now tag the video itself, even if the creator hasn’t disclosed it.

>Creators can challenge it in YouTube Studio, but some labels will stick, especially where the content was made with YouTube’s own AI tools or carries metadata showing it was fully AI-generated.

On long-form videos the label will sit below the player, and on Shorts it will appear over the video itself. YouTube says this won’t affect recommendations or monetisation, but it's still a line in the sand.

These research findings into the impact of short-form on TV viewership have gone under the radar a little. YouGov found that 77% of people who’ve seen TV or film clips on social media have gone on to watch the full thing. Among 16–24s, it’s 87%. But there’s a sting in the tail with this: 69% of 16–24s also say they’ve watched clips from shows or films instead of the full version.

>So what does this mean? Short-form is doing two jobs at once. It's driving discovery, but it can also satisfy the audience before they ever reach the original programme.

For broadcasters and streamers, that's the uncomfortable truth that many of us saw coming. Short-form clips aren’t just trailing the programme any more. They’re where people first see it, where they decide whether it’s worth their time, and, increasingly, where they decide they’ve probably seen enough.

I’ve been thinking about YouTube’s latest AI announcements from Google I/O, especially Ask YouTube and Gemini Omni. Ask YouTube is basically conversational search inside YouTube. Gemini Omni enables AI remixing inside Shorts and YouTube Create. The bit I’m interested in is what this does to journalism.

Video has often been treated as one way out of Google Zero. If AI search gives people the answer before they click the article, then maybe video still gives publishers a stronger route to audience, habit and trust. But Ask YouTube complicates that.

If YouTube starts answering the question before someone chooses the video, what happens to the actual video package? What happens to the title, thumbnail, structure, attribution and editorial context? And if AI remixing becomes native to the platform, where does that leave authorship?

I’ve written a piece on this for The 201, but I’m curious what others think: is this just another search/discovery shift, or something far more structural for video journalism?

During a call with TikTok earlier in the week I asked them whether journalists using TikTok LIVE would need different support from standard creators, given the legal, regulatory and editorial responsibilities involved.

Their response was really interesting: there is nothing stopping a Creator Network from building its own framework and best practice for journalists and commentators on LIVE.

>Let's take a step back for a moment. TikTok is not saying it will define journalism standards. It is saying the Creator Network could. So the real question becomes: what would a journalist-facing Creator Network actually need to provide?

Off of the top of my head: clear LIVE guidance, escalation when content is wrongly flagged, support around content moderation, and a framework for reporting in situations where accuracy, safety and legal risk carry real consequences.

That is where this starts to feel less like creator-focused support and more like the early outline of platform-era journalism support. And if that support is going to exist, journalists should probably be involved in shaping it before the platform logic does it for them.

TikTok’s answer raises a bigger question: if journalism is going to operate properly on LIVE platforms, who builds the infrastructure around it?

I’ve been chewing over YouTube’s Google I/O 2026 announcements, and it certainly makes for interesting reading. The launch of Ask YouTube is the one I’d be paying more attention to. The premise is simple: it’ll let users search for content conversationally. Users will be able to ask more complex questions and refine results through follow-ups.

And then there’s Gemini Omni, which will allow users to remix eligible Shorts with prompts and images. Again, this builds on conversational prompts, while opening up reference sources across image, text, audio and video.

>Now, for journalists caught up in the neverending backwash of digital disruption, the question isn’t whether these tools are impressive or even liberating. It’s what they’re going to do, and how they’ll impact content discovery, authorship and ultimately control.

Ask YouTube points towards a future where audiences may not search for individual videos in the same way they do now. They might ask a question and receive a structured answer, with videos pulled together by the platform. How is this going to change the value of titles, thumbnails, metadata and even the idea of what it means to “find” journalism on YouTube?

What happens with Gemini Omni, and where it leads creator behaviour in the long run, could upend the apple cart once again. By making remixing easier, you’re lowering the bar for participation and turning visual transformation into something much more casual and less deliberate. What happens when watching, responding and making are no longer separate behaviours? You could see them starting to collapse into one another.

Google recognises the risks for YouTube, but they only go so far. That’s why they’re talking about watermarks, metadata, links back to original videos, opt-outs and stronger likeness detection protocols. But none of this changes the direction of travel. As a platform, YouTube is moving towards a world where every video isn’t just something to watch, but something to query, cut up, reshape and republish back into circulation.

>YouTube is becoming less of a worldwide video library and more of an AI-mediated media system. Now that brings opportunity, of course. Better routes towards discovery and creation, and more ways for audiences to engage with ideas.

However, it also means publishers and journalists need to think harder about what this could mean for them. What part of a video report or package will Ask YouTube actually surface? Against a backdrop of fake news and misinformation, how easy will it now be to strip something of context through a conversational prompt?

With AI sitting between the audience and the video, the job of a news publisher becomes more than just making something worth watching. It’s going to be about making something that can survive being discovered, summarised, clipped and remixed as well.

That makes it a game of context as much as it does views.