August | 2026 | Online Journalism Blog

In a guest post for OJB, James Hickman pulls together a set of basic best-practice guidelines for creating data journalism videos on TikTok, from length and location to animation and style.

6 best practice guidelines for video data shorts:
1. Keep your data shorts under 90 seconds
2. Maintain a human connection
3. Locations reinforce authority
4. Show don't tell
5. Animate your graphs
6. Don't be afraid to innovate and adapt

Short-form vertical video is quickly becoming a key format for telling all types of news stories — and data journalism is no exception.

As a data journalist, I wanted to know how these outlets use this new and evolving digital video format to create “data shorts”: short-form social media videos in a vertical, reel-style format, that analyses or reports on specific datasets or newly released data.

I analysed 50 data shorts from the TikTok accounts of five major UK news publications — the BBC, ITV News, Guardian, Times and Financial Times — to examine how these digital news outlets approach the format. I looked at the genre of story they covered, the angles they focused on, their length, and their use of animation, to help inform my guidelines.