This new app wants to help prose-loving journalists make the leap into vertical video

In the olden days, journalists came in two major subspecies: print and broadcast. Neither side held the most flattering opinions of the other, and their work mostly intersected at press conferences and city council meetings. While some reporters successfully made the leap across genres, newspaper and TV people mostly stuck to their own skillsets.

The rise of the always-on internet was a boon for us word people, breaking up old stodgy formats and giving us some of the immediacy TV offered. But the rise of fast internet has been a gift to TV’s spiritual successors in social video. And to this day, a lot of word people in newsrooms would rather see editors kill their latest article than make a TikTok.

“I do still come across journalists who will be extremely condescending around social media platforms for only amplifying misinformation, or influencers selling stuff,” the British journalist Sophia Smith Galer told me. “Our journalism is useless if it doesn’t reach audiences, and the most valuable thing we can do as journalists is make our investigations and reporting as accessible as possible.”

Smith Galer, while working for outlets like the BBC and Vice, has made a name for herself online through social video. She’s got 550,000 followers on TikTok and 325,000 on Instagram, and her videos have been viewed more than 160 million times. And now she’s bringing what she’s learned to a new iPhone app named Sophiana. Its target audience is journalists — along with academics, authors, and other word people — who are more comfortable writing than talking to a phone screen.

“When people sign up for training with me, the main reason they’ve never made a video before is because they don’t have the skills or the time,” she said over email. “It’s not the will that isn’t there — it’s the spare hour in the day, or the years feeling comfortable on camera, that a lot of journalists miss out on.”

Sophiana’s purpose is to help reporters’ stories transition from prose to vertical video. Here’s how it works: Launch the app and tell it a bit about yourself. Are you a solo practitioner or part of a newsroom? A journalist, author, academic, or something else? Is your ideal tone more friendly, professional, or urgent? Then you paste in the text of a story you’ve written. The app then sends your story to OpenAI’s GPT-4o with a prompt informed by your style preferences and Smith Galer’s experience. OpenAI will return a set of three potential openings to frame your video. (You can ask it for more if you’d like.)

To test it, I fed it this story I wrote a couple weeks back about The Guardian’s whistleblower-communication tool inside its new mobile apps. The hooks it proposed were:

• Could a simple news app be the key to protecting whistleblowers globally?
• How can an ordinary app transform into a whistleblower’s best ally?
• Can tech innovation in news apps safeguard whistleblowers’ identities?

Not the most radically different set of three imaginable — but it’s a fairly straightforward story to work with. (The next three: “What if using a news app could secretly help protect whistleblowers?” “Could your smartphone hold the key to safer whistleblowing?” “How does turning news reading into a secret operation sound?” One could imagine those leading a segment on your local news broadcast.)

You pick one of the hooks (I went with the “What if using a news app…” one) and the app generates a script. Here’s what it gave me:

What if using a news app could secretly help protect whistleblowers?

The Guardian’s new app promises to do just that. It’s not just for reading the news anymore; it’s a hidden shield for whistleblowers.

Thanks to a system called CoverDrop, developed with Cambridge scientists, your ordinary app usage makes it harder for anyone to catch someone leaking sensitive information.

Imagine the difficulty of finding a needle in a haystack. Now, Guardian readers are the extra hay, masking whistleblowers’ communications.

The app uses its own data flows to hide leaks among regular traffic, keeping whistleblowers safe from prying eyes.

Whistleblowers can securely contact journalists without needing extra apps or tech-savvy skills. It’s a small step, but in today’s world, every bit of digital security counts.

This isn’t about replacing tools like Signal but providing a safer first contact.

Would you download an app, knowing your clicks could protect someone’s secrets?

It’s 150 words, compared to my story’s logorrheic 1,097. I think a good broadcast producer would have some edits — there’s some repetition, and a few clauses that read better on paper than they do in the mouth — but it’s pretty solid work. The app lets you tweak the script however you want and even suggests your caption, complete with hashtags.

Sophiana then takes you straight into your selfie camera, which doubles as an automatic teleprompter, scrolling the script as you read. When you’re done, the video’s ready to save or share however you want. It’s up to you to add on-screen captions, graphics, or anything else to make it more than the world’s most oddly stilted FaceTime call.

Smith Galer told me the goal is eventually for the app to learn a user’s TikTok voice over time, so that your 30th video could be much more attuned to your tone than your first. (“I use an AI email assistant that does this that I am over the moon with, and I can see the benefits it would bring Sophiana,” she wrote. “But obviously this is a lot more expensive to develop and run. It’s definitely one for the future depending on revenue and investment.”)

I was initially surprised to see Sophiana generate a script it estimated would take 57 seconds to read — longer than what I’d imagined the TikTok sweet spot to be. Smith Galer told me that’s a new platform reality: “Platforms are encouraging us to make longer and longer videos, as their business model is to trap us in their apps forever so they can make ad revenue off us. What we can exploit here as storytellers are more seconds to explain our stories! TikTok, as an example, only monetizes views after 1 minute, so I’d recommend longer content for anyone trying to make content creation more sustainable.”

The app is free to download on iOS, but she’s testing a number of potential subscription plans for unlimited usage. In the U.S., the prices on offer were $6/month, $30 for six months, or $50/year. I asked Smith Galer what’s next on Sophiana’s to-do list, and versions for Android and in languages beyond English were at the top of her list. (“I’m multilingual and that’s the last thing I want for my app!” Indeed, her next book is all about the demise of minority languages under the English hegemony online.) As a user, I think some basic video editing tools might be good for journalists who’d rather not have to head to CapCut to produce something usable.

Smith Galer hopes that Sophiana can both find users and help journalists bridge that divide between the medium they’re most comfortable in and the one their next potential audience favors. “I think that a platform being full of misinformation is a reason for journalists to better saturate it, as opposed to avoiding it! It’s our job to fight to improve information ecosystems and hold companies to account…In 2025, that’s through peer-to-peer vertical video.”