The challenge
Robin publishes some of the longest-running news brands in Italy, with 600 journalists and contributors covering regional and national news for titles including Quotidiano Nazionale, Il Resto del Carlino, La Nazione, and Il Giorno. Faced with the challenge of adapting its print business to a digital world, Robin has sought to transform how journalists tell stories — and give them the tools to do so — while growing digital revenue. Robin saw video as a growth opportunity, but views were inconsistent, and the process for publishing videos was complex and time-consuming. Robin’s titles published videos from a variety of sources — national and local agencies, partners, journalists on the ground — and each title did its own editing.
Video had to be uploaded separately to different platforms and changing the experience settings — for example, turning off the auto-play function or removing advertising pre-roll — was tricky. Plus, it was hard to see if similar content had already been uploaded. Robin partnered with Google News Initiative in 2021 to create a single platform for its video inventory, enabling journalists to search for existing video and upload and embed new video.
“Our aim was to standardise and centralise our video flows, and to give journalists a simple tool to manage video experience in pages,” says Paolo Zanzottera, Data and Advertising Platform Manager at Robin. The team also wanted to enable journalists on the ground to shoot original video that they could easily share with visual teams to edit for publication.