The info-reel is digital mini-column

Writers are Big Mad about short-form video being the new media bread and butter, and, to be fair, who can blame them.

Sitting in front of a camera does increase the chance of vicious personal attacks, and, like, you shouldn't be subjected to 'the worst of 90s tabloidism' 2.0 just because you're a reporter or writer.

But what isn't true is that, because the medium is visual, the skill of writing goes to die. Film and TV have made celebrities out of their writers, as well as the actors, even if it is just mainly Aaron Sorkin.

It struck me a while ago, while watching an Alex Falcone reel (of 'is it a scam-yep' fame) that scripted reels are very similar to a certain type of newspaper writing. 'Sidebars' are usually mini-articles relating to a page's main focus -- but really they're just tight bits of writing. The opening pages of magazines, and some newspaper opinion columns, often share a similar approach. Space for 200-300 words, that the reader can dip in or out of.

That is short-form! In fact, I transcribed three Alex Falcone videos, and one from Adam Aleksic (etymologynerd), and would it shock you to learn that they all landed in the 240-320 word range. In each case, they front-loaded information in a way that isn't quite 'inverted pyramid', but is a little like an ice-cream cone.

At the top is a treat (the hook); then comes a chunk of genuine information: the backstory of the Myers-Briggs test, reasons why 'divorce rate' is a bad statistic, why the world splits into 'chai' and 'tea' based on historical trading routes.

The second half has more information, but not as 'information-dense'. This is the cone. But the cone is one of those that's stoppered at the bottom with extra chocolate. These kinds of reels usually end with a kicker, either an extra bit of information or a good final joke.

This piece is written in the same way: only, I don't have a joke. Lousy cone.

Ok, now that that spell of tighter-than-usual writing is out of the way, there are some more observations from this little exercise.

By 'information density', I mean both facts and jokes and, possibly, visual assets. I might come back to this with some proper data analysis, but Falcone seems to use more images (fairly simply overlaid in the middle of the screen) early in his reels, more likely to have longer stretches of uninterrupted delivery to camera in the 'cone' section of the video. The three videos all fit in a range of 7-10 additional images, mostly screenshots, with Wikipedia providing a helpful crutch.

Routinely, Falcone would have a joke in his second sentence (unsurprising as he's also a stand-up comedian), and a joke as the final pay-off. Just from watching videos, Aleksic is less likely to have a clear kicker, but does tend to continue layering ideas through to the end of the video.

Interestingly, while this isn't exactly a thorough study, it runs against the more common advice about short-form hooks. An entire class of creators will tell you that the beginning of a reel should set up a thought or a question that is only paid off towards the end. It's not that Falcone or Aleksic never do this (Falcone does in a reel about divorce rates, promising the 'real' rate and duly delivering towards the end of the video), but it's not their pattern.

My theory -- or my prior -- is partly that attention-bait is a short-term strategy, and partly that the familiarity of big accounts (or, literally, familiar faces) gives people like Falcone and Aleksic some leeway.

For example, Aleksic has a recent reel about the r- slur for intellectual disability, which also talks about the concept of the 'euphemism treadmill'. In the 'classic' advice for short-form content, you'd imagine the reel opening with something like "the way people use the r-word may be changing permanently, and there's actually an established term for that" -- the term being something that'd be revealed right at the end of the video.

However, Aleksic introduces the term about a third of the way through the reel. The actual closing of the reel, the actual pay-off, is a completely new thought: "The real problem is why the euphemism treadmill exists in the first place. Because unless we communicate with kindness and intentionality, we'll always keep making new words offensive."

Whatever familiarity-premium Falcone and Aleksic have, it doesn't buy them out of a need for breakneck-pace delivery. Aleksic talked about this on a podcast appearance earlier in the year, talking about 'influencer accents':

"I use a very different influencer accent [than a stereotypical Mr Beast-type delivery]. I'll speak quickly, I'll stress more words to keep you watching my video. [...] The accents are formed around how you go viral on TikTok and that means you have to keep peoples' attention at all times. And there's different ways of keeping attention depending on what the meta portion of the video is about. If it's like a Get Ready With Me, you want this to be like a lullaby-esque, sort of tricking the viewer into following along. But if I'm trying to intensely deliver facts, I'm doing a different thing."

At its heart, this is just another old writer's trick: tone of voice. (In a literal sense as well as the metaphoric). And although it might be frustrating that media trends might force a change of writing style, a plus-side of short-form is that, well, at least its short. A writer wanting to adapt to the new normal can get reps in -- in terms of script-writing -- far easier than it would be for TikTok stars to find their feet on YouTube, for example.

Of course, the main sticking point for writers is the need for Actual, rather than linguistic, imagery. I might return to this topic another time, but I'll leave a couple of transcripts and the image lists for Falcone reels at the end of this. Image acquisition might be more 'energy expensive' than just writing words, but it can be done efficiently.