Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Francesco Zaffarano is a digital journalist and senior audience editor at Devex. A version of this interview first appeared in his Substack, Mapping Journalism on Social Platforms — subscribe here.
For this issue, I spoke with Seen‘s co-founder, Yusuf Omar. He was previously a CNN senior social media reporter on Snapchat and mobile editor at the Hindustan Times in India. [Ed. note: You can also watch Omar’s keynote from this year’s International Symposium on Online Journalism here.]
People use these tools to create videos they can submit to us, and then we have a team of amazing journalists — we have over 55 staff — who curates and package those videos into shows.
We have 12 shows, covering mental health, physical health, entrepreneurship, survivors of domestic violence and gun violence, sex education, and more.
A lot of people watch those shows. We have seven million subscribers to our shows across platforms. Most of them are 13- to 24-year-olds, primarily in the U.S. — mainly young women.
This is what Seen is today: a publisher with a unique set of tools that help people tell stories. But in the future, Seen wants to be something quite different.
Nobody has yet figured out what journalism looks like when you start to overlay it onto the world. But we’re certainly trying to work it out, and we’re making some important investments in that space. For example, we’ve done projects where you can look at colonial statues and they come to life, and you have generals saying, “I was amazing,” while their horses fact-check them, but they come to life with your phone with the glasses. And we’ve done projects in Boston where you can walk around and see history overlaid onto the city, and you hear poets narrate it.
Today, in 2023, we’re all about helping people feel seen through the stories that they tell about themselves. But by 2030, it will be more about stories overlaid onto the world. It might sound like two completely separate organizations or visions, right? But they’re incredibly connected. I think immersive storytelling through wearables can create more empathy and understanding because you can see the world through other people’s perspectives. More importantly, the augmented reality tools that we are building to help people tell their stories also work on the smart glasses. So it’s not like we are building for a future that doesn’t exist. We are building for mobile phones today, but that technology transitions to smart glasses.
Zaffarano: How did Seen start in the first place?
I could shoot and edit on the phone, and that kind of got me thinking about the development and NGO sector and those organizations that need to make videos…but why is video so prohibitively expensive and difficult to make?
And then we thought, there are like 6.8 billion phones around the world, and they’ve also got editing apps. Imagine if those folks could tell stories through Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and other platforms. The fundamental issue is that they don’t know how to tell a story, so my co-founder Sumaiya Omar and I traveled worldwide and trained 20,000 people in 140 countries. [Ed. note: Some of these trainings have taken place as MOOCs.]
At the beginning of the pandemic, it was just the two of us, but we had to hire 105 staff to train that many people. They managed shot lists, scripts, and storyboards, and by this stage, we were working with NGOs like World Vision, Plan International, the United Nations, and Oxfam. But we thought there’s got to be a better way to help people tell stories. So, we started experimenting with augmented reality.
At first, we used filters to disguise the faces of rape survivors while enabling them to tell their stories. And that’s when we realized this is a seriously powerful tool that we can use to do really interesting stories. So we thought, what if you could make high-quality videos with no cost without having to get a film crew, without having to buy a single camera? And what if those videos performed better than the high-production value stuff?
That’s why we started building augmented reality tools to help people tell their stories. For example, you have filters and lenses that give you prompts for self-interviews, directions to shoot a video like a professional, and help you tell stories that happened in spaces you don’t have access to — all by using immersive AR lenses.
Suppose you believe that the future of computing is moving from the keyboard to the camera as the primary input technology. In that case, they’re so well-positioned: they’ve got a great operating system around the camera, great hardware in terms of wearables, and great trust from their audience. Trust and privacy are huge things.
I also think that if you’re a small organization like us, you must focus. You can only do so many things. You can’t think you will have a million followers on YouTube, Facebook, and all the other platforms. Now we’re starting to play that game and diversify the platforms. But, initially, you have to do one thing really well.
It’s also exciting that we are doing very well on platforms other than Snapchat without much effort. We didn’t give a lot of love to Facebook. We just kind of published Snapchat shows on Facebook, and then we looked back, and suddenly we’ve got over a million subscribers, and we started generating something like $50,000 a month just from ad revenue.
If you asked me this question three years ago, I would have said that every platform is super different from the others. Now, they’ve all become quite similar. In terms of content, they’re all really focused on short-form, vertical video. So, they’ve all galvanized around the same format, making it incredibly easy to go viral across platforms now.
We can see how many people are recording using our filters. Since 2020, our lenses have been used 83 million times. We can also see if they submit that content to Instagram Reels or Snapchat Spotlight. And once we have all these people producing content, we can select those we find interesting to make an episode of our show.
That’s how, for example, we’ve been able to help the humanitarian organization Plan International create three-minute videos with kids in 43 different countries. That happened during Covid — they couldn’t send out a crew, the media industry was figuring out how to deal with that situation, and we were very well-positioned to help them reach those kids in so many countries.
Covid pushed the industry into mobile journalism and shooting with phones, and I think that’s a one-way trajectory. I don’t think we’re going back. They realized those raw, real intimate, relatable stories were better. It resonated with audiences more. It got more impact, and people trusted it more. Especially now that we are entering this world of artificial intelligence and generative video, I think people crave real and authentic storytelling.
Same with Ukraine. After the Russian invasion started and everyone was focusing on what Putin was saying and what the U.S. was saying, there were all those stories of black African people trying to leave Ukraine and being denied entry into Poland. We had the perspective of those people, selfie-style making their way and getting refused entry.
We had stories, not from some presenter telling you that people in Ukraine were living underground, but from people telling you their experience of living in bunkers and basements and places like train stations.
On filters and lenses, one of my favorite projects is an effect on Spectacles we built for the majority of Muslims around the world who don’t speak Arabic. There are many Muslims who come from non-Arabic-speaking countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, and we built an effect that allows you to see the Quran in English. And that’s just a powerful tool for utility for people to understand their religion better.
But also, when my wife was pregnant, we overlaid the baby’s development onto her body using AR so we could see how the baby grew weekly.
But we are trying to move away from ads being the primary business because it’s really risky. Algorithms change, platforms change, and we’re very exposed. We’re focusing our efforts on our brand studio and specifically working with organizations creating positive change. We’re not interested in selling cars or underpants or some useless stuff. We’re storytellers and journalists at the end of the day. We found a great market fit with charities. We also get revenues from training and public speaking.
We are cash flow positive, which means we earn more than we spend, and I’m really excited about that.
The two main things traditional journalists try to understand from us are how to verify and fact-check at scale, and if there is some interesting technology that we’re working on right now to validate kind of the process of the work we do.
We hold ourselves to the same ethical standards as somebody publishing a newspaper or putting up a TV piece. We don’t take it lightly.
Traditional organizations are also surprised we share everything about what we do. Sometimes people think their idea is so good that they don’t want to share it. But if your idea is so simple that you can tell it to somebody, and they can listen to it and do it, It’s probably not a very good idea. So yeah, we over-share because I think we’re all in this together. And we need to share our ideas if we really want to create a more diverse media landscape that is more representative and features more voices, more angles, and more perspectives.
