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.

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.

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