I was part of the team that launched The New York Times’ TikTok account, and alongside my colleagues, we pioneered vertical storytelling techniques for the Times, eventually landing ourselves at the top of the NYTimes.com homepage every week. Here are a few of my favorites that I produced.
I got a newsroom request to turn this investigation on the Lewiston, Maine shooting into a vertical video. Because of the limited visuals for the story, I created custom motion graphics (timeline and animated documents) to tell the story of the Maine shooter, step by step, based on an interview with the author of the piece. This video got 1.3 million views on Instagram.
I turned this data-driven article about the SAT into a video which I scripted, animated, and voiced.
I turned an interactive database story about college income inequality into a short vertical video, inviting readers to try out the database for themselves. This video got 2.5 million views on Instagram and 400k views on TikTok, and it also had the highest amount of users clicking through to NYTimes.com from TikTok of any video on the @nytimes account.
I attended the 20th anniversary performance of “Wicked” alongside theatre critic Michael Paulson. I weaved his interview with b-roll I shot at the event and interviews I conducted on the red carpet with Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel.
My colleague Karen and I pioneered a series of videos from The New York Times Book Review, working with editors to give concise book recommendations aimed at the “booktok” audience online. These were a runaway success, with multiple videos getting over a million views on TikTok.
