Digital media’s short story: Long form is feared dead, feel panellists

Kochi: Digital media leaders across the country seem to share the same worry -- the good old long form journalism seems to be dying, thanks to the changing dynamics of news consumption. The concern about the lack of interest in long form content was raised at a panel discussion at the sixth edition of Techspectations 2025, Manoramaonline’s flagship tech summit, in Kochi on Friday.

Gaurav Arora, COO, Jagran New Media, termed the users’ disinterest in long form a “very disturbing trend”. He said the trend has been affecting not just the editorial part but also business side of media. “A thing that we've seen at least on the digital side of business is that the users are not really going through the long form stories, which means the time spent on the products on our site is less and the opportunity to show ads is lesser, which is a direct impact on the business,” he said.

Arora said the investment in videos has increased because of the younger audience’s preference of the medium. “They're more comfortable looking at videos rather than the text and rightly so. It's a language agnostic or a literacy agnostic sort of a platform,” he said. Arora said Jagran has been trying to make short videos as informative as possible. Almost all of his fellow panellists, including editors, agreed.

“People are losing their interest in consuming long forms, they don't have time to spend in a website. They're getting content from various sources and they don't even verify from which source it's coming in. Those are the challenges we are facing,” Santhosh George Jacob, Coordinating Editor, Manoramaonline, said.

Sanghamitra Mazumdar, Editor, ABP Live, echoed the concerns. “The GenZ not only watch short form or short videos more, their entire news destination has changed. They are consuming all their news from Instagram. So long form actually does not work with them,” she said. She, however, was not fully pessimist on long form. “A language audience is more dependent on peer driven or community based news sources. But when it comes to validation of news they look to established traditional media. Maybe the wider lot is still looking for short form short videos in their own language. But I won't say that there is no appetite for long form at all because in our App we have launched premium last year and since then we have noticed improvement in time spent and engagement when it comes to long form premium content,” she said.

Vignesh Vellore, co-founder and CEO, The News Minute, said with their subscription model, they have observed similar trend. “I don't think that they are comfortable in paying for short form videos. So the longer explainers, those things actually work for us,” he said. He said there was a blurring line between content creators and media outlets nowadays. “People are able to identify with the anchor as much as the outlet as well. This is especially true for the younger generation. They're okay to watch a video of Dhruv Rathee who's basically taking the information from another user. So that's how younger generation at least consumes content. And we have figured out that probably creating anchor-based video shows is the way to combat this,” Vellore said.

The panellists also talked about how they have been using AI for content creation as well as revenue generation in different ways. The session was moderated by Nitin Sharma who leads the strategic partnerships with news publishers for Google in India. “At Google our mission is to organise world's information, make it universally accessible and helpful. And in that endeavour we have been working closely with the industry to understand what the news user wants, particularly the Indian language user and the younger generation. In current times the product teams at Google have been designing and launching features to better engage with news users,” he said.