Reuters has released its first documentary as it aims to bridge the gap between its text-based investigations and its wider video journalism.

The 28-minute documentary Death in Darfur, available on the Reuters website and on Youtube, reconstructs paramilitary violence in the Sudan city of al-Fashir using footage forces recorded of themselves killing civilians.

Reuters is aiming to create more video-based investigations to help reach audiences who are less interested in text.

Earlier this year Reuters hired Suzanne Vanhooymissen as its first documentary investigations editor and Sarah Cahlan as visual investigations editor.

Vanhooymissen, who produced and directed the new film, told Press Gazette: “We have within the investigations unit an incredible muscle when it comes to text-based investigations that get a lot of graphic treatment and beautiful animations online.

“And then we have within Reuters this massive video operation that has an incredible footprint, and it has access all over the world, and the idea is that we now want to, with investigations, be able to bridge that gap.”

Vanhooymissen said that previously text stories might have had a strong visual element conveyed via short-form video packages “but it was never part of the conception of the investigation, or it wasn’t part of it from the outset, and that’s what we want to change”.

Death in Darfur began after a Reuters team were among the first journalists on the ground at refugee camps in neighbouring Chad in October 2025 after the atrocities in al-Fashir. They did not originally plan to make a documentary but pivoted as the opportunity became clear.

Vanhooymissen said she hoped the wider Reuters team of 2,600 journalists would similarly start to spot opportunities where they have exclusive access or particular local knowledge.

The film also made use of a collaboration with Sudan Witness, which had already been gathering footage, as well as the Reuters Arabic team who helped verify and translate the material.

She said: “I already off the back of this film have received three or four pitches internally from other stories that now we’re going to start looking at, so the snowball will start rolling”.

The documentaries will be flexible in length, with former BBC Africa Eye producer and director Vanhooymissen saying it is a luxury to “make it as long as it needs to be”.

Reuters aims to build recurring audience for documentaries on Youtube

Reuters is creating a new playlist on its Youtube channel for documentaries in which it is, Vanhooymissen said, hoping to build a recurring audience who “understand that this is what we do now”.

“The Reuters Youtube, at the moment is very much focused around breaking news, so it will take some time, I think, for people to know that we’re there, and that that’s now a completely different product, but it’s worked for other broadcasters as well, so we’re hoping that slowly they’ll figure it out.”

Although the documentary is also on the Reuters website (and published in Arabic on its Arabic-language site), Youtube is where new audiences to the brand are expected to encounter this type of content.

Vanhooymissen said: “I would hope there is an appetite for depth, even among younger audiences… at the moment we haven’t got that longer form way of pulling them in with a visual, and they are highly visual audiences, so I think this is this is a step in that direction.”

A trailer for the documentary on Tiktok has more than six million views on the platform.

Vanhooymissen added: “It will hopefully drive that interest to the wider offering that we have, and just the amazing journalism that we do across the board.”

Reuters has had a metered paywall on its website since October 2024 and although it has not shared how many subscribers it has, Reuters Digital general manager Phil Andraos said this month they are “happy where we are now, for sure”.

Leela de Kretser, executive producer of the Reuters podcast division which has recently moved towards video podcasts, told Press Gazette paying subscribers are interested in “in-depth reporting – it is one of our strengths and our global reach, and this is the visual version of that.

“One thing that struck me with this documentary was we had never seen how bad it looked in Sudan in such a compelling way. This is a story that’s been invisible to the world, and the documentary actually showed us something that has been missing, and I don’t think you could have done that in any other form… that’s a value add to subscribers.”

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