Zalatimo of Forbes on the future of video

Salah Zalatimo, head of product and tech at Forbes, joined members of Digiday+ on Thursday for a Slack town hall.

Here are some excerpts:

Vertical video
“I see vertical video as the future of mobile video. We have seen 15 to 25 percent higher click-to-play on vertical video. We are currently reformatting some of our videos into vertical videos. But until we get to a place where content creators think mobile first, it will continue to be suboptimal. There will need to be video made for vertical only, and that is an entirely uncomfortable approach for today’s video producers.”
The need for speed
“We are focused on speed. On desktop, we rebuilt our page using Angular JavaScript with a lot of server-side rendering and a minimalist approach to the code. It saved us four seconds on start render time. For mobile, we built our article pages as a Progressive Web App.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.