GBH News Rooted’s The Message:
Short-Form, Big Impact 

The premise of The Message is simple: a two-and-a-half minute short-form video series featuring GBH News Rooted host Paris Alston, usually on-location somewhere in Greater Boston, exploring a timely issue — the closure of Spirit Airlines, the war in Iran, the recent Michael Jackson biopic — from a number of angles, especially those affecting Black people.

Just six months in, the results speak for themselves. Several Shorts have accumulated nearly a million views; 72% of people watch the videos from start-to-finish, and almost 50% of subscriber growth on the GBH News YouTube channel can be credited to The Message. 

At the heart of The Message is a triumvirate of talent. Alston and Executive Producer Tyree Rush contribute punchy writing, buttressed by the latter’s years of experience writing and producing for late-night comedy, including The Amber Ruffin Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Digital Associate Producer Edwin O’Neill’s editing is sharp and intuitive, enhanced by his Gen Z proficiency in social media and content creation. Add Alston’s natural dynamism on camera, along with her conversational but incisive journalistic approach, and you’ve got a formula for success. Every episode is punctuated with clips of Keenan Ivory Wayans’ mailman character from the 1996 American comedy film, Don’t Be a Menace to South Central while Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, from which The Message derives its name.

At once compulsively watchable and deeply thought-provoking, The Message has landed on a blueprint that’s made it an essential weekly watch for GBH News Rooted viewers. We sat down with Alston, Rush, and O’Neill to discuss the conception of The Message, what’s behind its remarkable success, and their long-term vision for the series.

How did The Message come about?
Tyree Rush: We were really looking at ways to be topical and timely in the news cycle. From the start of Rooted, we wanted the show to own the questions. These shorter and more pointed videos are an attempt to do just that: make something informative and engaging, but also encourage our audience to tell us what they want us to report on.

Edwin O’Neill: The Message began with trying to get GBH News Rooted in the short-form space. We’re putting a stake in the ground and filling something that I don’t think exists right now in short-form content. When we started, Tyree had the idea to use the clip from Don’t Be a Menace. That’s helped establish this as a series that viewers expect and subscribe to, and the YouTube Shorts algorithm — which values serialization — pushes it out.

Paris Alston: Say Brother and Basic Black had a pretty traditional format, and so this was a new way to package what we were doing. It’s a new muscle for me to develop, but something that has proven to be repeatable, digestible, and accessible for our audiences, and it’s impactful.

What’s made these Shorts so successful?
EO: It all comes down to strategy, and Paris and Tyree being brilliant writers. They put a lot of work into the scripts, giving The Message a level of quality that doesn’t typically exist in short-form content. Tyree will always be able to form a great script, and Paris riffs on it, adding something that’s clever or unexpected.

When we’re shooting, we don’t use a prompter. At first it was out of need, but we quickly realized it made for a better video. Paris remembers the script line by line as we go from shot to shot, and she interjects her sense of humor and turns of phrase.

One of the stats that always stands out to me is that we do really well with the older audience with these. People often mistake short-form as being only for young people — Millennials and Gen Z — but I think that’s backwards.

TR: We’re a show about Black culture and the Diaspora, but that doesn’t preclude us from conversations that all Americans are having. I think The Message is gonzo journalism, except it isn’t Paris’ perspective, but the Black perspective. But these are topics that all kinds of people across America and the world are wondering about.

The Spirit Airlines video was a good example of that. Everyone flies, or wants to, affordably. Whenever we tackle an issue that exists at the intersection of many identities, the video does well. And Paris is funny! I don’t think she always realizes it, but that helps a lot.

PA: I don’t know what kind of sense of humor I have, but they keep telling me I have one! To Tyree’s point, it’s not always so serious, right? Tyree and I both grew up along the spectrum of Blackness and all that can come with it, and one of those things is funeral culture. “The body’s still here, but the spirit has left” is such a quintessential Black phrase, so I threw it in there. It’s nice to arrive at those points when we’re putting these together — the more I can lean into it, the more natural it feels.

I think people appreciate that they’re getting news from a reputable source in GBH, and they they see me as someone who’s accessible and relatable, but who really knows what she’s talking about — and that’s because I have a great team working hard to make sure what I’m saying is fact-based. It’s a combination of a lot of different things, but we’ve got it down to a science since we started in January.

What does your writing process look like?
TR: We filter through headlines and decide on the most resonant one for the week, arriving at a question we want to explore. From there, we both take a first stab at it, then edit each other down until it feels like Paris’ voice, it’s factually airtight, and that it’s something that resonates with viewers, even if you’re not a Black person.

What techniques or points of focus do you have when editing these videos, Edwin?
EO: I’m always trying to make the videos accessible: I want the captions to be really big, I want everything to be legible, I want our branding to be clear and consistent, and I always want to have a title card. Because people just stumble upon Shorts, and I’m trying to make something that is uniquely GBH.

As an editor, I think about the Shorts like a song, a set of beats. Short-form content is effectively song-length, so it’s important to capture someone’s attention quickly. A punchy intro takes us to the verse, pre-chorus, bridge, etc., all circling around the same theme.

In the Shorts about the recent Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, Paris says, “complexity gets cropped for clarity.” How do you avoid that same kind of pitfall when you’re making these two-minute-long videos?
PA: The Message is a jumping-off point. Of course a single video on the internet isn’t all that you can learn about a topic, even if people take it that way. Our task is to get as much information as possible across in a short amount of time. But one thing we always do at the end of every video is ask people to drop their thoughts in the comments. Even if those end up looking like the wild wild West.

TR: We exist in a world where people have too much information. People come into our videos with a pool of knowledge that makes it easy for us to say, “What can we expect the average person to already know?” Figuring out what those are week-to-week is a bit challenging, but that’s part of being a journalist — no matter what your format is.

With The Message and short-form [content] in general, it’s pushing people to our long-form content. People come from The Message to conversations around AI literacy, or the capture of Maduro, or Haiti’s place in the World Cup. That’s the long-term goal: The Message will teach us more about what our audience wants to hear, and help GBH News Rooted fulfill its goal of interrogating Blackness — across the board and across the world.

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Watch GBH News Rooted’s The Message on YouTube Shorts and full episodes of here. The show will return to broadcast on GBH 2 on September 1. In the meantime, listen to GBH News Rooted podcast, available on Apple and Spotify.

Looking to see GBH News Rooted’s predecessors, Basic Black and Say Brother? The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between GBH Archives and the Library of Congress, has added more than 300 interviews, segments, and episodes to their Say Brother/Basic Black special collection.