Kassy2

Course summary

Social media plays a key role in spreading awareness and developing an audience. With platforms like Instagram and TikTok relying heavily on video, creating interesting and shareable content allows you to reach younger and more diverse audiences with high-quality news.

Led by Kassy Cho, a freelance journalist, producer and audience development strategist, this course will teach you how to create short, engaging and shareable news videos for social media. Through her experience working at Bloomberg QuickTake and BuzzFeed News, where she single-handedly ran the BuzzFeed @world Instagram account, making it the fastest-growing news account on the platform in 2018, Kassy has been pioneering new methods and formats for social news videos and visual storytelling.

In this four-week course, you will not only learn step-by-step how to create your own social news videos from scratch, but also build upon essential skills in scripting, structuring and breaking down complex news topics into shareable video content. As you develop video ideas, scripts, and create videos through the weeks, Kassy will also serve as a mentor, providing regular feedback along the way.

This course is suitable for journalists of all disciplines who are interested in using video to tell stories, from print journalists who want to start exploring video as a medium to video producers who are looking to optimise video for social media audiences.

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

  • Find and develop ideas for news videos for social media
  • Have an understanding of basic video formats and when/how to use them
  • Source, select and shoot footage
  • Distil news stories into engaging one-minute videos for social media 
  • Optimise videos for different social media platforms

Course structure

Week 1: Introduction 

  • Why video for news?
  • Principles of creating engaging videos
  • Introduction to video formats

Week 2: Creating a basic social news video 

  • Where to find stories and gather footage
  • How to film your own footage and b-roll 
  • How to reach out for and use user-generated content
  • General best practices

Week 3:  Taking social news video to the next level

  • Scripting 
  • Editing principles
  • How and when to incorporate interviews and vox pops
  • How to frame and structure videos

Week 4: Explainers and new formats

  • How and when to produce explainers and longer form videos
  • How to work with videos on Instagram Stories 
  • Working with journalists who don’t come from video backgrounds
  • How to adapt videos for different social media platforms

Getting there

This is self-directed online course. You will get access to our online training platform on 12 July and then work through each unit week by week in your own time. We advise to set aside around 3-4 hours a week for this.


About Kassy Cho

Kassy Cho is an award-winning journalist and audience strategist pioneering an Instagram-first approach to growing young audiences. Previously an Audience Development Editor at QuickTake by Bloomberg and BuzzFeed News, she single-handedly made the @world Instagram the fastest growing news account on the platform in 2018. Kassy is also known for her reporting on online culture in Asia Pacific and is credited with popularising Chinese memes such as “Karma’s a bitch” and the Four Generations challenge in the West. She has worked with companies including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Channel 4 News and the women's health app Flo.