Turning journalistic investigations into crime stories

Podcasts and YouTube opened direct interactions and access to expanded audiences for investigative newsrooms. However, what effort does it take to build a YouTube channel for the investigation newsroom? At Mixer programme within Point Conference 2023, Ezana Ćeman (OCCRP) asked the renowned investigative media professionals about it:

• Semir Mujkić (BIRN BiH)

• David Ilieski (IRL Macedonia)

• Yanina Korniienko (Slidstvo.info)

Read full transcript below:

Turning journalistic investigations into crime stories

Hello, my name is Jakub Gornicki and this is Story Mixer, a podcast in which we are talking about just one thing how to make great stories. Mixer is an organization which is devoted to supporting journalists, storytellers, influencers, basically people who produce stories in Europe, and in different places all around the world. We organize workshops, we do events, and we provide media support services. But what is the most important thing is that you meet great people who do great stories. I want to give you this opportunity to hear our conversations as we talk and try to understand how to make a great story. So hello, this is Story Mixer, a podcast about how to make great stories. 

Ezana: My name is Ezana  Ćeman and I'm an assistant product manager for investigative tooling at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. And today I will be moderating our great panel, Brand New Crimes and Investigation, where we will be talking about investigative journalism and the challenges and changes it faces due to the expansion of YouTube and podcasts. We have three great speakers with us today, so I'm going to call them down one by one. David Ilieski, a reporter at the Investigative Reporting Lab, Macedonia Earle, and an ID researcher at Okpe,  Yanina Korniienko a Ukrainian journalist from Slidstvo.info and Semir Mujkić, managing editor for the Balkan investigative reporting network (BIRN BiH).

Ezana: So thank you all for joining us. And I think it would be great if you could all just briefly introduce yourselves, basically where your base is, your main areas of focus and how long you've been with your current media organizations. 

David: I am David Ilieski, I'm based in Skopje, North Macedonia. I work as a journalist investigator with the Investigative Reporting Lab, which is a media organization focused on investigating organized crime and corruption in Macedonia. And we are part of the big network, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, where I also work as a researcher.  I'm here to represent our production team which is doing documentaries and podcasts. 

Yanina: Hello, everyone. My name is Yanina Korniienko. I'm a Ukrainian journalist working for  Slidstvo.info. It's an investigative, agency. We were also part of the OCCRP Network. And, today I will talk about how we are presenting our investigations, on YouTube. 

Semir: Hello, everyone. My name is Semir. I'm the managing editor for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network office in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We report mainly on war crime trials, reporting and investigations of the war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But in recent years, we've also expanded to cover corruption, to cover foreign malign influences, to cover a different kind of radicalization and extremism processes both in Bosnia and in the region. I will be, talking about how we actually started using YouTube as a new social media for us and how we sometimes, do content specifically for YouTube and just for YouTube. And how do we incorporate it into our investigations, both on, war crimes, but also in, in the different topics?

Ezana: Perfect. Thank you all for your introductions. My first question is for Semir and Yanina. Why did your outlets start using YouTube? And can you also tell us the benefits compared to written journalism? 

Yanina: Okay. So, our, media started to work with YouTube, a lot of years ago. First of all, the first reason is just because we can't work with, TV in Ukraine. Ukrainian TV channels are mostly, owned by businesses or politicians. And according to our ethical, rules and, philosophy, we want to work with them. So we wanted to do independent investigative journalism. That's why we, started to produce investigations, on YouTube. The second one is, that the Ukrainian audience doesn't like, reading complicated stories. So we tried to pack these, complicated schemes in videos. So to make it easier, for people to understand, what's going on, if we choose, any video platform, YouTube is the most popular, I think. Also, when the invasion happened, the Ukrainian audience started to read a lot and watch a lot. And YouTube format helps people, to get information quickly and easily. So, we keep working there. 

Semir: For us, it was, a way to discover new audiences. We have this TV show, a monthly TV show that's been aired on some 20 TV stations in Bosnia. So it's been going on for years now, and we were always uploading it on YouTube, the full TV show for everyone to watch. But we weren't so focused on actually having people watch it and promote it, and using YouTube as a new platform to reach people. Somehow it's strange, but people are willing today to spend more time watching something than reading something. If you have a long investigation and it takes you 15 or 20 minutes or half an hour to read it, people are not so keen to read for so long. But if you put a video of 30 minutes, sometimes they're more willing to watch 30 minutes of a video than to read, even if it's longer, even if it takes them, to continually watch it, they're still more willing to do that. So I was interested in seeing how we could use YouTube to promote this TV show but also to do a different kind of stuff. And what I saw is that we could reach even though this TV show is being aired on different TV stations, I realized we could reach a new audience. And it's not just, a younger audience. YouTube is an emerging social media platform in Bosnia. But by some, reports, Facebook is still the first, Instagram is now in second place and YouTube is on terms. So Twitter, even though we love to use it, is not that popular in Bosnia. So I wanted to use this advantage to actually that we have this multimedia production. So there's a younger audience that's willing to look at it, but also some older, audience which now has smart TVs. And if you do your job well, your content can be this related or suggested content, and you can reach them if they are watching something on YouTube, or their smart TVs, your content could pop up. So I wanted to see how could we, use that to our advantage. We don't have resources or servers to use video on our server, so we always use YouTube for videos, and I wanted to see if we use, such as we use Instagram or Facebook. How can we grow a YouTube that was our idea. 

David: I just want to add something to what somebody said that, it's not that people do not read. At least in our case, we can see it like, this because when you do this hardcore investigative journalism stories, you publish long pieces. But I think that using YouTube is targeting a different kind of audience. One thing because everybody says that it is like trying to reach a new audience, but it's also like trying to find new ways of storytelling. Because when you do investigative journalism, you have these stories which can be applied to good storytelling in a written story with 3000 5000 words. But also there are stories which are good to be told in a video, which you're not going to be able to express the same things that you are going to be able to express through, a written text, the same way that you're going to be able to do them, you know, in a video format. And I think that's also one very important thing, the ways of storytelling that the video gives you. 

Ezana: Thank you all for your insights. David, my next question is going to be for you and specific to IRL. So IRL does podcasts, and the 16th episode was just released recently. So can you take us back and tell us how IRL got started in creating podcasts?

David: So basically, IRL has existed for around five years in Macedonia. It was founded by Switkowski and a team of journalists, a small team of journalists, in the media landscape, which was very unstable, same as everywhere else in the Western Balkans, mainly everywhere in the world. Now we can see that it's a very unstable medium, market. We decided to try and find different ways of how are we going to how are we going to shape and tell these stories. So two years ago, when you do this, as I mentioned before, hardcore investigative journalism stories about the corruption of organized crime, they're not always the ones that, you can only tell, through written texts. So through these efforts, we managed to set up a whole production team which started to do, a documentary series. Two years ago, we started producing the documentary series called Newsroom, and they're long-length documentaries. We are collaborating with filmmakers, directors, and movie editors, who are helping us to find other ways to tell these stories. So basically, we were producing this documentary series for one year, and we were publishing it on YouTube and the National Broadcasting channel, and it got there a lot of traction, and people started watching it a lot. So the idea for the podcast came with this, with this documentary series, we initially wanted to have like a podcast which would talk about the behind-the-scenes of the investigations that you can watch in the documentaries. Rebuilding trust in media is a very important part of our work. And through showing how journalists do their work and through showing how we dig through the documents, how we, try to do our work most ethically and professionally. I think that's one way of how you can regain trust. And the podcasts give you an insight into what we do as journalists, and what we face when we are investigating these stories. Because, you know, we are always under a lot of pressure and there are interesting things behind the scenes. So I think that people want to listen to this kind of stuff. So basically that is why the podcast is called Talks in a Newsroom it's kind of to give an insight into the journalist's work at IRL. There are tens of thousands of views, on each podcast, which for a small country like Macedonia, which has an audience base, of less than 2 million, I think the numbers are good. So when we saw that, we decided to have this podcast as a regular thing, which we publish once every two weeks. We expanded it beyond only the documentary series. And we still give insight on the investigative stuff. The interesting parts of the journalist's work. 

Ezana: Perfect. Thank you. David, it's really interesting. So, we have a nice mix of organizations that do podcasts and organizations that make informational videos for YouTube and so on. So I want to open up this next question to all of our speakers. Are there any specific challenges or opportunities, rather, that have emerged with the rise of YouTube and podcasts specific to your organizations or if anything, you just want to mention generally? 

Yanina: Yes. In Ukraine we had a lot of audiences, come to our channel and we produced a lot of videos in, first months of the war, and it brought us a million views, for each, video. And, that was, that was a big challenge for us because we had to keep these, keep this, frequency of publishing to keep this audience, on our channel. But, I think, it's, really depends on the topics; no one knows how it works. And I think that our communication team, don't understand how it works, and now we have a big hole in the views. People don't watch it so much, and, I can understand them. All that violence we have to show, and all that violence we watched a year ago, it's not possible anymore to watch, that much. And I think it might be a reason why people, don't, watch videos, as actively as it was before. But at the same time, we have doubts. Maybe they want to watch it and we try to propose to them stories about corruption again, and not only about war crimes, as we, did last year. And maybe we should publish more about war crimes, and then the audience will stay with us because we want to work for people and we don't want to work just, you know, to do it for us. And of course, it's important for us, what people think. So, yes, now we have, like, the biggest challenge. We don't understand, what people like and what they don't. And what audience want? Before the war, it was people who watched stories about complicated offshore schemes, about domestic corruption. Then, our, channel grew up with people who watched war crimes, and now we don't know who are anymore because it's a mix of boys. And, and we also mix stories. And that's why we can choose the best way to work. So I think this is a big challenge for us in YouTube. And also, we have a lot of competitors,  I mean, not only a media but also bloggers who produce. I won't say good content, but, let's say fact-checked content. And, they get a lot of views just because of the way they show it to their manner of presenting. And maybe they make things simpler, which we can't allow ourselves to do, for ourselves because we need to like, do it properly, or according to old journalism standards. And I think these bloggers are huge competitors for, independent media, independent media nowadays. So I think this is our most challenging first year, last month. 

David: And this is an interesting topic that Yanina mentioned in terms of how you work with the YouTube algorithm and what you're trying to produce when it comes to YouTube. And when you try to fit into that whole bubble where you have a lot of content producers, a lot of people who don't do just like the basic journalistic work and then try to tell the story through YouTube, but they do not apply the same standards in the same, professional, ethical standards that a journalist should have. It's kind of you. It's a hard challenge to try and find the right way. So basically, I wish we could not be led by what the algorithm of YouTube wants, but do the professional work of a journalist and use YouTube as an outlet where you will be able, to reach people. I have other ideas about challenges and opportunities, but I wanted to hear what Semir thinks about this. 

Semir: For us, the biggest challenge would be to switch and learn how to switch between, the writing style and formats to the video format. So it's completely different. Then you have to train people to think differently. You have to think about all sorts of different things. And I would say that it costs much more than to produce just the written piece. It also takes much more time. And when I said you have to look at some specific things, for example, you always think in a written report about how to start a lead, how to make it rich and how you want it to look. You have to do the same with the video. It took us some time to realize it. You would usually start your introduction with a landscape shot or something. But if you don't start with the face, someone's face, there's a great chance that your video will be just a swipe. So we learned that you have to start immediately your video if you want people's attention. Because these first seconds, when they decide whether they're going to watch it or not are important. And it goes against your natural storytelling where you want time to set the place for people, for your viewers, and for your readers to understand where you are. What's the story? But with this format that you put on social media and all we do on on YouTube, we use it for Facebook and Instagram. You have to start immediately to get them interested. For us, it was also how to make it look really good. It's I think there's a big gap between doing these simple, videos that you can do with a mobile phone, that you can do quickly, and that you can edit on a mobile phone or a basic laptop. But there's a big gap. If you want to do a professional production, then it costs much to get all the equipment to have people. And are you going to have people in the house, or are you going to take someone from the outside? So what we do now is we do have in-house cameramen and two video editors that will work full-time. So we realized that's the best if we want to have professional production, but it costs and it takes you time to do these stories. To do these videos, you also have to think while you are doing an investigation, you have to record that. You have to do it at the same time because you want to show people how you did it. You want to record the people you are interviewing. Sometimes it’s a problem because it's easier to get people to talk to via audio recording rather than on camera. But all that said, I think there are greater opportunities to actually, reach new audiences. And for us, it was also important because as we are on 20 different TV stations, we don't send them these shorter videos. And also for this longer format, some of the TV are not interested in actually airing it, not interested because they think it's badly done. But some of the topics, especially for foreign malign influences. If you do a topic on Huawei, for example, then it's the question of which of these TV stations will air because they might have commercials from that company. So YouTube became our direct channel for our viewers to go directly to them. I would say that the great opportunities are YouTube shorts that you could use for us. It showed that it usually has more views than the video you put on just a normal regular video. So it works well on the challenging part of this big investigation. Fact-checking is also a problem. When you do video, it's it's different and you want to do a video as quickly as possible with the story. Sometimes you change something, something changes in the story. It's much harder to change something in video editing than it is to change something in a story. You just rewrite the sentence here. You have to record the audio again, or you have to do graphics again.

David: I'm going to agree. The most challenging part of the video production part is the resources in terms of money. Because video production, as you said, costs a lot of money if you want to do it the right way. I also decided that we were going to take a new host theme, but we took a theme that was previously not working in the journalistic world but was, was fully in the movie production business directors, movie editors, and people who came from a different sphere. And, we decided to take a little bit of a different approach. We don't go with the standard YouTube algorithm that we need to catch the attention of the audience right away. Sometimes we are not sure what this is like. On the other hand, I think that building an audience is a slow progress and you need to teach them what you're doing. So the approach that we took is having these, long-length documentaries that have a three-act structure and, they go slow. Then they set up an antagonist, the protagonist. In our case, the antagonists are the journalists who are investigating these stories. So basically, I think it's a little bit of a different approach, but, coming from here to the opportunities that this way of storytelling gives you, especially with the podcast and with the documentaries I mentioned before, it's building trust in journalists, which I think it's one of the biggest issues at this moment in the world. Because people do not trust us, people do not read the news, people do not listen to the news. People think they're entitled to their facts. And one of the things how we decided to tackle this is that we as investigative journalists, trying to uncover the truth, try to uncover crime, you know, and it's, for the people outside this world. This is a very interesting thing. You know, you always, as mentioned before, watch this crime series or crime podcasts, which give you an insight into how somebody is investigating. People most usually think that us is journalists just take the information and we're going to give it to you. But we as journalists are in a tedious word. We go through a lot of databases, we talk with a lot of sources. We are under a lot of pressure when we are investigating. So basically, part of the documentary and mostly the podcast as well, is telling you how much we do this work behind, behind the scenes, meaning that we are the people who are investigating the information that we are getting is not just served to us by some people in power that want to influence somebody something. But mainly this is made for a good cause. We are fighting corruption, we are fighting organized crime, and we are showing you how we do this. Same with the documentary. Same with the podcast where we talk a lot about how we do things, and why we do things. And we also like often in the podcast, call other journalists from other media outlets and they share their own stories in terms of how they do the investigation. I think this is a very important process, and we are seeing that as people react to this, people are trusting us more people are more open to talking with us, and people approach us to tell us their stories and to to find, like, an outlet where they can where they can get the truth out. 

Ezana: Perfect. Thank you all for your insights. I just wanted to piggyback off of something that was mentioned. So we brought up engaging new audiences. We brought up new storytelling techniques and the trustworthiness of journalists. So I think the main question here is, how do you navigate between the balance of maintaining journalistic integrity and meeting the needs of your viewers? Because when it comes to YouTube or podcasts, most of the time, in many cases, it's prioritized entertainment or some sort of sensational content. So where's the divide? 

David: I'm just going to have a quick answer. There's no divide. Journalistic standards and professionalism are imperative, and there's no topic for discussion in this field. I don't think that getting more views can be put on the same level of discussion, whether you're going to sacrifice the integrity of the journalists just to get more views. So just a quick answer. No topic of discussion. 

Ezana: All right. So moving forward, question for each of you. Can you mention an example of a notable investigative journalism, case or anything that you did that was a huge success, let's say, and made a huge impact that came from either your YouTube channels or from podcasts? 

Yanina: Well our investigations usually reveal for our audience some phenomena that exist in Ukraine. How it was, before the war, sometimes it somehow influenced, the decisions of our politicians, but not that often. Now, I think, it's mostly about documenting history. So I think that the result of what we are doing now will be, easy to see in a year because of what we are doing. The biggest part of our work is just documenting war crimes. So we're going to a place where crime was committed, for example, like, killed civilians. We are doing fieldwork, just collecting papers on the ground, just the bullets, etc. too, for example, recording via cameras on the street. Then we get back to the office, we analyze it, and we, try to get a list of Russian soldiers based on that village. For example, if it was a village, then we try to identify also Russian soldiers from a specific, military union. We print their faces, get back to a village, and show them to people and ask them to recognize them. If people recognize them, we have a story about a specific killer. Not just a random army who committed a crime, but a specific soldier who did it. We know his name, and we know his face. This is just a simple quick story we do every week, but we also do documentaries. And, the last two documentaries are about, the deportation of children to Russia. And, my colleague managed to get back them home and we filmed kids in Crimea and occupied Crimea at that moment. And she contacted them just to ask about how they, appeared in that, seat, in that, territory. And they said they didn't want to go there. They just forcibly moved, to this city, and they went and they want to get, back home. We realized that these are already our sources because we talk to them and they are in danger because of us. And we tried to help them leave, to get back to Ukraine. So they travel from Russia, through Europe and then back to Kyiv successfully. So I think that successful story because kids are safe now. And, to show it to our audience, we usually do a presentation in a cinema if it's a documentary. And I think it's a really powerful, tool because it makes something special. Because when you just publish it on YouTube, it can pass in the number of random videos from bloggers, journalists of news, etc. but when you do a movie presentation and the cinema people come here, people make an effort to come and spread it, spread it around friends, and then it becomes, new itself that, C-Span for presented movies. So it's become more special, and yes. So, talking about a successful story now, I think, a story when someone survived, it's already successful. But, talking about corruption in it depends on the case.

Ezana: Thank you for sharing that. 

Semir: Yeah. Our experience is quite similar. I would say documentaries work well on YouTube. We recently did a documentary on how these far-right narratives, both in Serbia and in Bosnia, led to violence against the LGBT community and the stopping of Euro pride in Belgrade. We also did a live show, which connects you to the audience in a different way than it is just publishing online. But, YouTube proved to be good for, documentaries, both investigative and different kinds of documentaries that will explain you something, give you a different perspective. What also really works well for us is our explainer videos. This is by far the most watched content on all of our social media platforms. People like to watch simple short videos of three, 5 or 7 minutes to explain to them something that is quite complex or that is trending. They want to say 3 or 5 things. To understand what's what's important there. When we talk about the investigations that that we're good with, with, due to. I could talk about two. The recent one is we did this video, which gives you in a couple of minutes, shows you the whole story we did on the Russians that are trying to open companies in Sarajevo. One of them is being high up in one of the gas companies. , Ukraine wants him sanctioned, but he tried to open a company here. In the investigation, we found out there's a guy in Syria who is helping the Russians to open companies here, but they also face a problem Western banks are not willing to open their bank accounts because they are afraid of the sanctions. So we had a conversation with this guy who is opening the companies. We couldn't reach this guy from Russia, but the whole video was really good. And it is. It had good viewing on YouTube and a lot of feedback. The other thing,  YouTube helped us with is not the long-form video, but kind of a trailer that we did that we used before we published the story, but also when we published it to attract people to read the whole story, which was a huge multimedia story. It probably takes you like 20, or 25 minutes to read. We made this video into a minute and a half or two. It's about a group of people who were healing a woman who died of leukaemia. Her disease was curable by the advice of her doctor, but at some point, she connected to the group, to this group of people, and she listened to them. She refused the official medication that she was recommended and she died. So her family provided us with the messages that she was sending to these people. And we recorded some of the family members and we showed some of these messages on video. So proved to be good to get you get people to read your story and to, understand it, to be attractive. Also, we do this big database which is based on videos. We did one for siblings. It's 100 videos with 2 or 3-minute videos of testimonies of these people. And this is something that people love to watch. So I just wanted to. 

David: Do you think that the short videos that should promote this because this written story, can go viral, but the people who watch the short video are not that keen to read the full story? Like if you compare the views that the short video got to the amount of readers and, the link, they stayed on the story, do you see that?

Semir: Yes. There's always a discrepancy between people who see these shorter videos and those who read them. But in my opinion, these people wouldn't see the story at all. So it's a benefit for me if they even see this short video. I tried to explain it. Some of them will click, some of them will see. So it's a win-win situation for me. I know it's a challenge whether you are giving them just something short and they will not go there. But if you cannot get them interested, probably they won't be reading it at all. So for me it's it's a benefit. 

David: When it comes to successful stories, I think what makes a successful story for us, the number one thing is causing impact and making change in society. When you publish a story, and a thing, of course, that's very interconnected with the amount of views and amount of audience that they're going to watch or read the story. Because for changes to happen, you need to have public pressure. One successful story that, I want to mention this is coming from my well, is the documentary that we published last year. It's called Bad Blood. It was a long-length documentary about cardiac surgeons in Macedonia, which was, performing, an experimental medical treatment on Covid patients. When we published the documentary, it caused a huge boom in Macedonia, basically on YouTube, like 600,000 people watched it, which again, came back to the audience group of less than 2 million. It's a lot of people to watch this documentary. But why this story was successful not only because it got a lot of views, but also because the prosecution head was proactive in this case. Now he's facing charges, he's in court. They are charging him for scamming people and endangering people's lives. Hopefully, he's going to go to jail for that. Why I wanted, to mention this story because I think that the connection between good ethical and professional journalism and finding a new way of storytelling, having this 60-minute documentary with a three-act structure where the journalist is an antagonist of the story and he's facing this protagonist the other way around. So the protagonist is the journalist, and he's facing this and thinking, which is the bad guy in this story, this doctor who is working, not in the way the doctor should work? And I think that this caused like a very an intertwined into this. You have the victims who whose the families of the victims. Who's who? The people in the hospital died. You caused a very emotional reaction with people. And I think that people, when they have an emotional reaction, do resonate, with the story. And this is why the prosecution had, such a good reaction. And coming back to the podcast now, this is around when we were starting the podcast, and right after one week after the the documentary was published, we produced the podcast. And we do we mostly do video podcasts. We publish them on our YouTube channel. We also disseminate them on Spotify Instagram shorts and YouTube shorts. But the main audience group is on YouTube videos and this podcast gained more than 100,000 views, which was very connected. So I think that trying to find products that, can work together with each other is a very important part when you're, you're trying to tell a story and this is the way how you can cause impact because you need to keep the pressure going. You just don't publish one story and stop there. But you need to find other ways how to keep this distraction for the institutions to react and finally do something about it. 

Ezana: So we're reaching the end before we get to our audience Q&A. But I just wanted to thank you all for your insights. Semir, Yanina, David, and I think we're all excited to see the future of investigative journalism when it comes to YouTube and podcasts or any other platform that may arise in the upcoming years, and new trends and developments. So I just wanted to say that we had some great discussions today, and we would love to open up the floor. We have, I think, 15 minutes for an audience Q&A. So if anyone has any questions, please let us know and we'll have someone come to you. 

Ezana: All right, I'm gonna throw another question out, and then we can see if anyone else has any questions, and then we can wrap up. So I started getting into future trends and what we're anticipating. So I would love to know your thoughts on what is the future of YouTube in podcasts, in investigative journalism. What developments or trends do you anticipate? Do you think a whole new platform is going to arise sometime soon? Maybe we can delve into that. 

David: I think that YouTube is still going to see the steeple of how journalists, where journalists put their, their video stories. I think is the main channel that we're going to continue using it, in the next few years. The thing that is going to probably change is how we tell the stories. And I think that because we mentioned this and Yanina brought it up last in terms of how the YouTube algorithm works and what people do and what is happening in general in terms of trust in media. And this is widely connected to having this play out of, people vloggers, which just try to try to occupy and focus only on the YouTube algorithm. I think that what will distinguish investigative journalism and this like way of professional doing, professional way of doing journalism is, the new ways of storytelling. And I think we should focus more on that. And I think we should be persistent and not just only fall just to clickbait and just try to get, the views, but stay focused and stay on the path that we are here, to tell the truth. We are here to expose crime and we are here to to bring change in this society. So I think, I'm, I'm not seeing that in the next five years. For example, in a short period, there's going to be a huge transition in terms of where we put the stories out. But I'm seeing that he's going to be a hard fight in terms of how to combat this clickbait, clickbait outlets, outlets. 

Yanina: I completely agree. I think that storytelling is, the solution for those, who want to work with some mitigations. And we also pay a lot of attention to our cover photo on, YouTube because, before people click on the video, they see a cover picture, and, they're heading and we pay a lot of attention to how to call it and what to put on this picture to make, to attract the audience. So I think a good, good, taste of these covers is helping too and I also think that YouTube is, will keep, be, being, the main platform, for videos, however, we will see something opposite. I remember SoundCloud or SoundCloud. That was, popular when it was a Covid and everyone expected this will be, it will be a revolution. But, I don't know how it's in your countries, but in Ukraine, you see, people even don't remember what it's, named, called, right? So I think, yes, we should, keep learning how to work with YouTube, learn more about our audience and to understand it, to meet them. And that will be a key to success. 

Semir: I think. I think most of all, the video is here to stay. I think it's, it's going, to grow the usage of videos, both in investigative journalism and in all different kinds of journalism. I see that our production now has much more videos than we used to do. It was maybe 5-10% that we were making videos of all of our content. I would say in our everyday work today, it's more 20-30%. I would say we are focused on the video because we see the impact it's making, and the reach it's making. I think video is here to stay. That said, both Facebook and Twitter are not famous for a video. I mean Facebook more, but it's still not a platform. People used to watch videos. I'm still not sure what's going to happen with Instagram and Instagram videos. We see a really big growth there. A lot of people love to watch videos on Instagram, and YouTube is still the only one. It's the most used video platform on the planet. And being with Google, I would say they would not be making any changes such as Twitter made lately and destroyed the platform. I don't see them doing that, so I think it's going to grow more. The only question is how much more can they grow and what's the next thing? I think that they are seeing some kind of limits with the videos, regular videos that that they are using and shift to different kinds of formats such as shorts, which are not horizontal, but vertical videos, shorter videos. I think they're trying to, use, people who like to watch Instagram videos to get them. Also on YouTube, I see the platform struggle for viewers, meaning that there are some limits to it, but it's going to stay. It's going to play a big role in media. For us, it doesn't just play a role on the YouTube platform, it plays a role on our website where we want to incorporate video into our stories. In 95% of the cases, it's a YouTube video because we cannot host all of these videos on our servers. It's a good platform. It's easy. Everyone can view it. You don't have compatibility problems. It's really easy to embed it. So I think it's it's going to stay there. It's going to stay also for podcasts, a lot of people use YouTube for for podcasts to record them. We haven't started any podcasts just because if I start, something I want to do is regularly and I don't see that I could do both YouTube and podcast now, I think it's better not to start something and then have something every six months. If you want to do it, do it, do it properly. So it does require some planning, I would say, but I think that YouTube is going to be important, specifically because people are watching it now on television, not just on their mobile phones, but more and more people are switching from cable news and cable content into the YouTube or Netflix or different kind of streaming services. And I think it's going to play a big role. So this is one too. 

David: Before we wrap up, I just want to add something in terms of the I think it's okay. Now I just want to add something in terms of the context in the Western Balkans that people, the audience here in the last years were not that used to using YouTube as a platform where they go and they subscribe to your channel and they follow them and they use it. We know how the Western world or the United States mainly uses it in terms of following a platform, having it only there, not not having a website and using it as a separate, platform where you just like publish the video and link it to your website, but using it as specifically a platform where they go and watch the video, same as Spotify. Now we are seeing a trend where people more and more are starting to use these platforms in the Western Balkans. The other trend that we are seeing is that not only does the short format work like people want to dedicate more time, but people want to listen to longer-length formats. And, the biggest example of this is podcasts. We do podcasts, which sometimes last two hours, and we see that people watch more than an hour of the podcast, which is a lot of time for somebody to spend on their phone or their headphones. And this is like mostly a video format of podcasts. So I think that we, as journalists and then we as producers should not fall in the loop and only focus on the short format and do the short formats because it's easier for people to. Scroll, but we need to educate people and we need to produce more long-length formats and make them consume it in a, in a more, in a better way. 

Ezana: Okay, so thank you all for your valuable insights and for the work and the impact that you and your organizations are making. I hope that this panel was helpful for everyone and we are going to wrap up there.