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Back to School, Pt. 3: Vidiofy for Social Media Videos

Sept. 5, 2023

Mike Reilley

Sep 5, 2023

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final installment of our series on AI tools for students, instructors and professional journalists.

One of the questions I often hear during my presentations is: Where do I get started with AI tools? A couple of good places for student journalists – and the pros – are social media and video editing. Both are time-consuming processes that can be streamlined using easy-to-use AI tools.

One such tool is Vidiofy, a generative AI video platform designed specifically for news pulbishers. I’m experimenting with this fall with my UIC digital journalism students, and, based on my solo experiments with it over the summer, it has game-changing potential.

You can embed article URLs in the interface to create social videos on-the-fly, and it also does horizontal videos that work for YouTube. An added bonus: the tool is free up to 75 minutes per month.

Publishers can effortlessly create hundreds of high-quality videos every month, eliminating barriers traditionally associated with video production: time and cost. Vidiofy bolsters newsrooms' content to unlock new revenue streams and engagement on web and social.

The tool also is intuitive to use and gives you editing control over video, photos, text and you can even create customized templates for your brand (paid account). You can easily make the changes before exporting it as an .mp4 file and share over your social channels.

Vidiofy’s editing interface in which you can edit by slides (left toolbar)

The other cool thing: it’s built for journalists, by journalists.

"I wish I had this platform when I was a Multimedia Editor, managing my team of 10 journalists,” said said Stacie Chan, Co-founder and CBO of Vidiofy.ai. “You have to try it to believe it. An article or string of text becomes a video in under 5 minutes, embeddable on your website and shareable across all social media."

You can build videos three ways:

Article to video: Provide Vidiofy with a link to an article at least 500 words long and it will create the video. It will extract your photos and video from the piece or provide its own from a rights-free gallery. You also can sub in your own photos and video through a user-friendly interface before exporting.

For me, this distinguishes Vidiofy from Runway and other popular AI-driven video-editing tools. The ability to pull from a story link, then do detail edits on-the-fly isn’t offered by many other tools. Runway offers text-to-video and photo editing in its interface as a bonus, but the article-to-video feature sets Vidiofy apart, in my book.
Text to video: Type at least 50 words or paste part of a story into the interface to get a social video on the subject.
Topic to video: Type in a specific topic and it will generate a video about it.

Sponsor

Limited number of complimentary memberships for Journalist’s Toolbox AI readers available with code: “JOURNOAI” at Rolli.ai

The tool allows you to export in multiple languages as well. Its video quality is excellent: They maintain a high-level of accuracy and brand integrity. The blend of AI/ML plus custom design ensures no hallucinations and on-brand authenticity, which is an issue with many other text-to-video or text-to-image tools.

Here’s a tweet I posted last summer using a Vidiofy video produced from one of my students’ stories last spring:

You can see for yourself how to build a video like that by watching Vidiofy’s demo or signing up to try the beta. Or you can watch my training video below to pick up some basics.

Want Training?

Contact Mike Reilley at mikereilley1 (at) gmail (dot) com to schedule an AI tools training for your staff.

Also consider a paid subscription to this newsletter or donate to Buy Me a Beer so I can build more training videos.

More AI Tools and Other Resources

Rolli
Quickly discover and book leading experts for your news stories with this AI-powered newsgathering platform built by journalists, for journalists. Find experts, scan the news cycle 10X faster, access a preloaded news planning calendar, even get social engagement scores for your published content.
Perplexity Llama Chat
AI chatbot built by Meta
Legitimate
An all-in-one AI tools suite built specifically for journalists.

Textbooks

The Journalist’s Toolbox

My new book, “The Journalist’s Toolbox A Guide to Digital Reporting and AI” will be published by Routledge in December. You can add the book to your wishlist and have the opportunity to pre-order it.

The book features tips, tricks and training videos on how to use digital tools, AI, mobile apps and more in your reporting. It makes for a great newsroom guide or textbook for reporting and digital courses. It’s available in “E-book Plus”, which embeds training videos and pop-ups directly into the book’s interface. It’s also available in paperback, hard cover and regular e-book format.

Data + Journalism

Samantha Sunne and I co-authored a textbook, “Data + Journalism” that’s available now on Routledge. (Order here). It’s an introductory- to intermediate-level guide to learning data storytelling from A to Z.

It features examples, interviews, links to tools and dozens of practical exercises to learn how to find, scrape, clean, visualize and write with data. We also explore ethics, transparency and basic math skills. We even offer a bonus chapter — Chapter 13 — on diversity and inclusion for free on our blog.

In Quotes …

“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.” — Stephen Hawking

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