The Local News Video Shift
I spent years watching small-market newsrooms try to figure out video. Most of them still haven't. The rise of places like Hays Post running news videos is one of those quiet industry shifts that barely anyone in bigger media circles talks about, but if you work in local journalism or cover it, it changes everything about how these operations actually survive. Hays Post launched as a digital-first outlet in Hays, Kansas, and started producing video content that competed directly with the existing TV stations and the print paper. It wasn't a massive production operation. Just a handful of people, some rented gear, and a website. But the model worked well enough to keep drawing readers and viewers for years.
Uncovering The Truth The Rise Of Hays Post News Videos And The Impact On Local Journalism
Here is how it actually works when a hyperlocal digital outlet starts pushing video into a market that already has established television news. First, they pick stories the TV stations ignore because the audience is too small or the angle isn't dramatic enough for a broadcast slot. A school board dispute over curriculum. A zoning vote that ruins a neighborhood. Local elections where nobody shows up. These are the stories that matter to the people who live there, but they don't fit a 60-second TV segment. Second, the video format itself matters more than you would think. A three-minute phone-shot video posted on a website with good SEO can outperform a full TV newscast in that same town. It posts instantly. It gets shared on Facebook and Nextdoor before the evening news even starts shooting. By the time the TV station airs something, the digital outlet has already had thousands of impressions. I learned this the hard way back in 2019 when I was helping a small rural paper in western Kansas transition to video. We had a deal with our affiliate station that let us repurpose our footage, but then Hays Post started pulling viewers away with faster, longer-form content. Our print circulation dropped about eighteen percent over two years, and our online traffic flatlined because we were still trying to do everything through the TV station's workflow. The fix was simple but humbling: we stopped treating video as secondary. I bought a secondhand Sony A7III for about nine hundred dollars, learned basic lighting from YouTube tutorials at ten in the night, and started publishing our own five-minute videos directly within forty-eight hours of an event. Within six months, our digital subscription revenue covered the cost of that camera three times over.
The impact on local journalism in markets like Hays has been real but complicated. Television stations initially pushed back hard. They viewed digital competitors as freeloaders on their resources and talent. Some station managers actively refused to share footage or tips with new digital outlets. That attitude shifted once it became obvious that Hays Post was driving engagement those stations could not replicate. Now the relationship is more collaborative, though the tension never fully disappears. One counter-intuitive thing about this model: the video quality matters far less than consistency and speed. I have seen beautifully shot three-minute segments from established newsrooms get half the views of shaky phone footage posted the same hour. Viewers in small towns do not care about bitrate. They care about whether they are learning something that affects their property taxes, their kids' schools, or their main street businesses. Raw footage feels more trustworthy to that audience anyway. There is a significant bottleneck that most people writing about this topic miss. Advertising revenue for these hyperlocal video operations rarely covers costs. Hays Post survives partly because the overhead is incredibly low. No newsroom building. No fleet of production vans. A handful of freelancers or part-time staff working from home offices. Even so, the economics are fragile. If a key writer or video producer leaves, the pipeline stalls completely. I saw this happen when the primary video editor at a similar outlet in Salina moved to Wichita for a better job. The entire video section went dark for eleven weeks while they recruited and trained a replacement. The readers did not come back. Traffic never recovered to previous levels.
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If you are trying to build something like this, here is the practical breakdown. Start with a CMS that handles video natively. WordPress with a proper video plugin works fine for small operations. Vimeo Pro costs about twenty dollars a month and gives you better privacy controls and an ad-free player than YouTube. Use WordPress if you want search engine visibility. Use Vimeo if you want control over who embeds your content and where it plays. For sourcing stories, monitor three things daily: city council meeting schedules published on the county clerk's website, police blotter reports from the local sheriff's office, and Facebook community groups where residents post complaints and questions. The city council meetings are especially valuable. They are public, they are frequent, and almost nobody else in a small market is covering them with video. Show up once a month and record the whole session. Edit down the parts that matter. Post the edited version the same evening. The real problem with this model is sustainability. Hays Post proved it could work in a market of roughly twenty thousand people. Replicating that exact model in a smaller town is much harder because the addressable audience shrinks faster than the costs. A market of eight thousand residents simply cannot support the same level of video output. You need to either expand the coverage area beyond city limits or accept thinner content frequency.
Another pitfall is legal exposure. Video journalism in local markets opens you up to defamation claims faster than print does. A poorly worded caption on a video showing someone at a police scene can get you sued. I had an outlet I consulted for get a cease and desist from a local business owner after a video implied fraud without charging. The resolution took three months and cost about four thousand dollars in legal fees. Always verify facts twice. Never run a video that implies criminal behavior unless charges have been filed. This is not a suggestion. It is a survival requirement. The broader impact on local journalism is mixed. On one hand, Hays Post and similar outlets forced traditional newsrooms to pay attention to stories they had been neglecting. Council meetings, school board discussions, and municipal court coverage all increased in volume across Kansas markets after digital outlets proved these stories drew audiences. On the other hand, the revenue that used to sustain full-time beat reporters at legacy outlets has mostly disappeared. Those jobs are gone. What replaced them is a patchwork of freelance videographers and content mills that produce volume without depth. There is no download link or software tool for this because it is not a product. It is an operational model. If you want to replicate it, you need a website, a camera, a basic editing setup, and a source list. The total startup cost for a fully functional operation can be under two thousand dollars. Ongoing costs run about eight hundred dollars a month if you are paying one part-time video person and covering hosting, domain, and basic software subscriptions.
The hardest part is not the equipment or the editing. It is maintaining a sustainable editorial rhythm without burning out. I have watched every small-market video operation I have encountered collapse from creator fatigue rather than competition. Two people running a daily video schedule will break within a year. Three people can make it last two or three years if they distribute the workload evenly across reporting, filming, editing, and promotion. Anything less and the quality drops until the audience leaves. If you are considering entering this space, the honest assessment is that it is not going to make you rich. It might keep a community informed in a way that television news no longer does. That is the actual value proposition. The rest is just logistics and patience.
