How the Economist is using Facebook Live video

Lucinda Southern of Digiday writes Monday about how The Economist is using Facebook Live video to have its journalists interact with readers.

Southern writes, “The Economist has been experimenting with Facebook Live since January, but the publisher has far from figured out how to translate its polished journalistic brand to the low-fi format. The Economist now uses multi-camera shots and has deputy community editor Adam Smith onscreen to make the video seem more dynamic. But there is a balance. The Economist’s 30-minute question-and-answers are only engaging to a point. That has Smith considering what is ‘our watermelon for current affairs,’ a reference to BuzzFeed’s wildly popular exploding fruit video.

“‘We’re having lots of internal discussion about where the balance lies between being scrappy and being slick,’ said Smith, who is on screen taking questions from Facebook users during the Brexit videos. ‘No one wants to do turn Facebook Live into a TV broadcast, but it is difficult to deviate from the things you have done before, and you have all these skills and hardware. You automatically want to do things at a higher quality.’

“Until now, the Economist’s Facebook Live efforts have been piecemeal. In January, it propped up an iPad and streamed correspondent Lane Greene straight to the camera fielding questions from users about whether the internet is killing language as we know it.”

Read more here.