WSJ’s video team cranks out 40 videos a day

Lucia Moses of Digiday looks at The Wall Street Journal’s video team, which has 40 employees and cranks out as many as 40 videos each day.

Moses writes, “The Journal has about 40 full-time people dedicated to video and produces about 30 to 40 videos a day. The Journal has been getting about 6 million monthly video views on site over the past year, according to comScore (which doesn’t measure mobile video yet). But it trails archrival The New York Times, which has 75 full-time video staff and 18 million monthly video views by the end of 2014, up from 11 million in the beginning of the year.

“People don’t necessarily come to the Journal looking for video as much as they are to get caught up on the news. Hence the Journal has been putting more video at the top of news stories. The site was redesigned last week, and video is getting more play on the homepage, with a bigger video player and a top-five videos module. ‘Even today, it’s not easy to get people to click on video, especially with the stories we’re covering, which are not always going to be llamas and Academy Awards dresses,’ Regal said.

“News publishers have constraints that others don’t. Their traffic is, to a large extent, a function of the news cycle. News often isn’t visual in nature, so they don’t lend themselves to the video format. So the Journal has been trying to inject more graphics in videos to tell non-visual stories.”

Read more here.