Audience Engagement Platforms
1 min read

BBC journalists are using Stitch to speed up social video production

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More than 300 journalists across bureaux are using the tool to create quick videos for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Over the past five months, the BBC has been rolling out a tool called Stitch to World Service bureaux, to enable journalists to easily reversion visual materials in English as well as create their own videos for their audiences on social platforms.

Stitch is an in-house project from BBC News Labs, developed by Kirill Skorodelov. It is designed as a web interface with various video and graphics templates available, that can be used to create tailored visuals for platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, in a bureau’s own language.

All editors or producers have to do to start using Stitch is log in with their BBC credentials and fill in a web form. They can then choose between two options: reversioning an existing video from their bureau or from the central English-language content hub by adding subtitles and graphics using the existing templates; or creating their own templates using the admin tool, which everyone else can re-use.

More than 300 journalists from different bureaux have been using Stitch and their feedback so far has been positive. Since the reversioning process requires less specialised skills compared to editing using tools such as Adobe Premiere and Adobe AfterEffects, it has allowed smaller bureaux to “increase their video output by a significant amount”, said Allison Shultes, engagement producer at BBC News Labs, in an email to Journalism.co.uk.

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