At The Philadelphia Inquirer, we’re leveraging our high-quality journalism, social video expertise, and audience listening to platform video storytelling across social platforms that is consistently useful, insightful, and revealing. A concerted effort between our Social and Video teams has led to an ecosystem of one-off videos and recurring series that is becoming widely regarded as one of the best among local newsrooms in the country. It is a slate of programming that we are proud to deliver to our audience.
Our social video programming leans heavily into personality and informing our audience in relatable formats. That work is deeply exemplified by our newsroom’s first Social Video Host, Ariane Datil. She has quickly become a trusted, recognized face of Inquirer content on social media. Her dynamic on-camera presence has accelerated our growth in social video and her versatility allows us to leverage her for her own series, timely one-off videos that break down complicated subjects, and as a contributor to other series such as Inquirer Investigates. Her performance is something our competition has taken notice of and that our audience has grown to appreciate.
Series and concepts built around our reporters have also become a staple of our social video strategy. In 2025, we launched WTF w/ Tom Fitzgerald. The series stars our transportation reporter and was born because of a wave of questions from our audience that stemmed from a crisis that threatened the area’s main transit agency. We soon discovered that Tom’s personality was perfectly suited for social media and that he had instant trust and credibility with audiences across platforms.
This year we launched Inquirer Investigates, a multiplatform, multiformat series that repackages stories from our investigative team. These videos are produced and optimized in multiple formats so that they best fit Instagram and TikTok while also serving YouTube and other longform platforms. For example, here is the YouTube treatment and the corresponding Instagram/TikTok treatment for an investigation into suspicious foreclosures of properties near Temple University. It has become instantly clear that our audience deeply appreciates the fact that we do this type of high-impact journalism regularly. This series signals that we are not shy about highlighting it as we deeply believe it is the sort of depth that makes us stand out from our local competition.
In addition to those successful projects, our social video programming includes:
Series like this are not our only social video output. We also have been responsive to the news as it happens. When the Trump administration removed slavery exhibits on Independence Mall, we captured it and followed up the next day with a deep dive explainer video.
We believe deeply that our strategy can stand as a model for local newspapers everywhere.
