The unexpected moment the BBC’s Ros Atkins knew it was time to unleash his explainer videos
The Outside Source host had been studying ways to systematise virality for trustworthy news content. And then a viewer stepped in…
Ros Atkins may have only relatively recently entered your orbit as ‘that guy who explains things on the internet’.
The BBC News presenter and journalist has enjoyed a significant profile boost because of his explainer videos — one of which, on #Partygate, hit 5.9 million views on Twitter alone.
You know the one; “Drinks, nibbles, games.”
On 3 December 2021, Atkins tweeted to say the clip had been viewed 1.5m times. It’s now 5.9m.
But there’s a hell of lot more going on behind the camera than a man ‘just saying facts’, as he was once described to me.
Besides being responsible for the transformative 50–50 Project - ensuring equal representation for men and women, both on and behind the camera — he is also host of BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show, the man behind the ‘oddcast’ Texting Keith Olbermann and the frontman of the BBC News show Outside Source, which helped birth the explainer videos. He’s done his fair share for sales of navy blue shirts too.
“Atkins has created a template for impartial, longer-form, authoritative news content for the insanely partial, short-form and disinformed internet.
If you zoom out from those individual accomplishments, Atkins is a field-leading digital strategist. What does that mean? Atkins has spent a considerable amount of time researching, writing and executing his ideas to make traditional TV and radio content perform better on digital platforms.
That’s easy, you may say. After all, he has the might of the BBC, its audience and a huge social media following powering him, right?
That’s true to a point but what Atkins has done with his explainer videos is create a template for impartial, longer-form, authoritative video content for the insanely partial, short-form and disinformed internet.
It’s no accident.
Ros Atkins BE (Before Explainers)
Atkins is a classic overnight success — 20 years in the making.
Aged 47, he lives in South London with his wife and two daughters. He grew up in a lot of places because his dad was a fisheries consultant for the UN and travelled a lot.
Young Atkins spent time away from his native Cornwall (Newlyn and Helston) living in Trinidad, South Africa and The Bahamas.
Prior to his BBC News career he was a website editor for Time Out. When he joined the Corporation in 2001 — weeks after the 9/11 attacks — he began as a producer for Simon Mayo’s show on Radio 5 Live.
“One of the things I was preoccupied with in those early days was how could you get online discussions and online activity to influence a live radio broadcast — how you could potentially intertwine those?” said Atkins.
“I didn’t have the answer, by the way, and I still don’t, but the but the idea that those two things could connect better was there when I arrived.”
“We hadn’t yet decided to start what I was proposing.”
Atkins went on to create the TV show Outside Source in 2014 as “a response to the way that content is produced and consumed digitally.” He relaunched it in 2017 after a period of studying other formats, both inside and outside news programmes, to try and work out something that had been bugging him. Namely, why wasn’t Outside Source — an innovative digitally-focused show in its own right — performing better on digital platforms?
“I’d spent about six months in 2019 thinking and writing and reading a lot about how to have a greater digital impact with a TV programme,” he said.
“And I’d done lots of work around tone and impartiality and thinking about graphics, length of clips, you name it. I’d done a lot of work, written a few documents. I was feeling good to go.
“We hadn’t yet decided to start what I was proposing that we do. And then the bushfires came along.”
An apocalyptic Australian bush fire season began in September 2019 and by the time it had burned out in March 2020 as much as 110,000 sq km of earth had been scorched, 5,900 buildings (including 2,779 homes) had been razed and at least 30 people had lost their lives.
Atkins — a former presenter on BBC World Service — was doing his thing for Outside Source in front of an outsized touchscreen at Broadcasting House just up the road from Oxford Circus in London. But the person who played an unwitting role in the creation of his explainer phenomenon was on the other side of the world.
“Someone in Australia had seen us do an extended report on the Australia bushfires, had filmed it on their phone — off the TV — and had put it on YouTube,” he said.
“And then it was doing like 150,000 or 200,000 views on YouTube and people were sharing it going, ‘This is great’.
“The woman who produced it — a brilliant reporter and producer called Courtney Bembridge — spotted it and said, ‘Have you seen the thing we did yesterday or the day before is doing good numbers?’
Bembridge, currently a reporter with BBC Africa Eye on the World Service, recalls that in the wider scale of things the numbers were “not massive views but compared to other videos he’d posted, the number was big.
“It was getting shared organically across Twitter and FB (Facebook) in Australia. I wrote the script and produced the clip so people started sending it to me. Mainly Aussie journos who knew it would have been me writing it.”
The clip was was almost five minutes long — which is counter-intuitive when many social video analytics use metrics of 1.5 and 3.5 seconds — but Atkins took confidence from the organic nature of the sharing of his content and resolved to go a step further.
“That kind of bounced us into going from the theoretical work I’d been doing around this thing to, ‘Well, maybe we should actually start doing it’,” he said.
“So, the first one that went viral was long because it wasn’t intended. The second one and the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth ones, if you look them up, are all two to two and a half minutes.
“We kind of spotted the chance and then much more consciously started to implement some of the theory that I’d been working out over the last few months.”
It’s ironic to think that such a purely digital and envelope-pushing format of newscasting was kick-started by someone ‘taping it off the telly’.
Atkins revealed detail in an interview with students at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. You can see the full recording of that interview at the bottom of the page.
The interview was designed to help some of our MA Journalism students with their social media video assessments and Atkins, very generously, gave them the kind of forensic detail you’ll find in his journalism.
If you want the full masterclass then watch the full video lower down but here’s the short version…
Ros Atkins’ eight tips to make better explainer videos
1) What are you explaining?
“You need to set the parameters of what you’re trying to explain. If you make those parameters too broad, you’re going to come unstuck. When people start watching an explainer they need to have a really good handle on what they are going to have explained. What you need to watch out for is biting off more than you can chew.”
2) You need context
“You need to set up why you’re talking about it. I’m working on another explainer at the moment which is considering whether what we are all experiencing as a country with Covid is really the kind of situation that we need to get used to in the long run. Is right now actually the normal that we have to get used to? Now to really unpack that, first of all, you’ve got to establish what’s happening. You’ve got to establish the number of cases, why we think the number of cases is rising. Are they connected to policy or the new version of Omicron? You need to establish the degree of disruption to schooling, the NHS, to workplaces like the BBC. That’s all the context. You need to set up the reason why you’re asking the question before you then launch into the explanation. If you watch my videos, often the first bit is set up.”
3) Decide what is essential
“You need to decide what is essential and what is a luxury. On any subject there are thousands of pieces of useful and interesting information. You can’t put them all in. Some of them are interesting, some of them are essential. Which are the bits of information that, if you didn’t include, you couldn’t explain this issue?”
4) What are people confused about?
“I always have a list — either in my head or sometimes I write it down — of “what are the things people want to know?” The reason I’m doing an explainer on ‘[Covid] ‘is this how we’re going to live from now on?’ is because everyone’s going ‘Is this how we’re going to live from now on?’. There are other questions within that, like ‘to what degree is this connected to policy?’ Those are all questions that people have got in their minds. So when I’m making an explainer, I like to have a list in my mind of the questions that by the end [of the video] people should definitely have concluded.”
5) Texture
“No-one wants to listen to me for five minutes without breaks so you need to think about texture. You need to think ‘what are the different elements I can use to explain this?’ Outside Source has a touchscreen or a suite of graphics, a variety of tools we can use to explain. Think about how much of a mixture of content you can use.”
6) Joining sentences
“Think about how you take people from one part of the explanation to another. A classic way of writing a GCSE history essay would be to go ‘I’m talking about Henry VIII. First of all, I’m going to talk about his wealth. Then I’m going to talk about his health’ and at the end of the ‘wealth’ section you would go ‘And so that’s the situation with his wealth. Let’s also consider Henry the VIII’s health’. There’s nothing wrong with this, right? But if you’re telling a story, you don’t want to have ‘blocks’ and so anytime you watch one of my explainer videos, you’ll see me do it because it’s a pet trick I use.
“You’ve got to use hooks to take people from the place you’ve got them to, on to the next place you want them to go to. So I might say. ‘And while some of Henry VIII’s courtiers were worrying about his health, others were worrying about his wealth’. This is a very basic example. But you need to think about what I call ‘joining sentences’ that take you from one part of the explanation to the other. You keep taking people through it, rather than them feeling like there’s a ‘block’. That for me makes an explainer much much more watchable.”
7) Answer the question
“If you’re promising an explanation you have to think about how you’re going to tie this together. It’s not okay to just go ‘there are three or four elements to this’ and just stop. You need to think about what is the way you’re going to join this back together and leave people with a thought that is going to help them understand the thing that you’re explaining. Quite often when I’m making explainers I will be quite far into the process and we’ll look at the script and I’ll say: ‘Everything we’ve got is factually correct. Everything we’ve got is written well. Everything we’ve got is well-researched. There’s no problem. But what are we trying to say?’
“So if you asked me, what am I trying to say about false claims of denazification in Ukraine, I would tell you it’s that there are some neo-Nazis in Ukraine, but they’re a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the Ukrainian military and they do not in any way represent the false depiction of the situation from Russia. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s knowing what you want to say and making sure you say it at the end.”
8) Fix any problems
“When you’ve made it, watch it back and if you feel that it’s lagging at any point, you’ve got to fix it — you can’t wish it away. If you’re spotting it, your audience will feel it and when you’re producing a digital piece of content, they just move somewhere else. They just close the video and go somewhere else. Spot those moments of weakness where the explanation is just not quite holding you. They’ll always be there. I mean, they are whenever I do them anyway, but if you can spot them, you can fix them.”
Ok, if you’ve made it this far down the page then you’re pretty into this stuff.
As a reward, here’s the full video interview. Be warned, it’s almost an hour long. So before you press play, maybe make yourself a nice cup of tea. Consider a biscuit. Drinks, nibbles, etc…
- Gavin Allen is a lecturer in Digital Journalism at Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Culture. He is co-author of the book Writing for Journalists and a former journalist and editor on The Mirror, MSNUK, Mail Online and WalesOnline.
Originally published at https://medium.com on March 30, 2022.
