At first glance, WSJ app users may only notice the name and logo change. What was once WSJ Live is now WSJ Video, reports Nieman Lab. Why? The Wall Street Journal is adapting its video strategy. This shift follows a May announcement that the Journal was canceling live digital broadcasts at 8:30 am, 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Among the shows being canceled is WSJ Live’s News Hub, a five-year old news program hosted by Simon Constable.
“We will continue producing all other live output as well as on-demand video programming, breaking news, special event coverage, and reports from our journalists around the world. The quantity of videos produced monthly is not expected to change,” said Journal spokesperson Colleen Schwartz in a May email, according to Politico’s Hadas Gold.When WSJ Live was launched in 2011, it was at the forefront of the live, digital news movement, but the Journal found that producing live news wasn’t as easy to create or as popular to its target audience as it expected. Like the New York Times’ TimesCast and the Washington Post’s PostTV, the Journal cut back its live programming in favor of high quality, on-demand video.Andy Regal, executive editor of video at the Wall Street Journal, explains: “We continue to stress live video. We are covering press conferences and live events all the time.””People come to the Wall Street Journal when they have time, or need a break or when there’s a big event,” Regal says. “If we continue to try to drive people to appointment television, it’s just not a workable business model. That’s been proven by most who have tried it.”In spite of that, the Journal still has a good viewing audience, and video views are on the rise. Regal told Nieman Lab that this strategic shift will allow video reporters and producers to create quality journalism that’s visually interesting without being pushed into a live time slot. Another needed change will be tweaking the Journal’s video site to make it easier to navigate.Insider Take:Trying to stay ahead of news trends while anticipating an audience’s needs is a difficult task, but the Wall Street Journal has repeatedly taken risks to be on the forefront – as it was with video. It gave its WSJ Live experiment a good run, but like other news outlets, it ultimately decided that the experiment didn’t work, and it is making necessary adjustments to meet the needs of its audience.We hope the Journal will continue to monitor the results of its new strategy and to tweak it as it finds the sweet spot between what it wants to produce and what its audience wants.
