Launching Skift Lens Documentary Unit

Today we launched our newest product, our Skift Lens initiative. With Skift Lens, we’ll continue our same in-depth coverage of the travel industry, but we’ll add documentaries into the storytelling mix.

You can watch the first documentary Barcelona and the Trials of 21st Century Overtourism here.

Visual storytelling isn’t completely new to us: Our SkiftX team has done video for two years now, executing excellent projects for partners including Mastercard, Amadeus, Hyatt, and others. But on the edit side we’ve focused on writing: breaking news, analysis, and long-form writing, like this oral history.

But on the news side, Skift Lens documentaries take us deeper into visual storytelling.

We won’t pull back on any of that writing. Instead we’ll be expanding through the use of documentary-fluent contributors around the world. And we will supplement the documentaries with related stories that expand on the ideas beyond what’s possible in clips and sound bites. You’ll see that later this week with a piece about Airbnb in Barcelona.

It’s especially exciting because the documentary comes to us from contributor Samantha Shankman, one of our first hires at Skift. She’s since left to chase other stories, but it was her relocation to Barcelona earlier this year that got the idea of the series moving, and her excellent reporting and editing skills that made it a reality. She interviewed over two dozen insiders in Barcelona and elsewhere in Spain to better understand the issues, and the end result is something we are proud of.

Our Editorial Promise

We understand that not everyone likes documentaries and videos, and sometimes news outlets surprise their readers with auto-play clips. We won’t force you to watch anything and will accompany all our documentaries with additional text for context. No tricks.

We also won’t be churning out multiple documentaries every day just to say “we have this.” Quality documentaries take time and money, and we’re not going to trick you with content that’s designed to fill a Facebook feed or please an advertiser rather than fill your mind with some good ideas. Our hope is that you sit back and take time to watch this work as you would take time to read a well-reported story.