🔴 How to turn articles into short-form videos

Is it possible to be a journalist, creator, consultant, and tech founder simultaneously?

Our guest this week is Sophia Smith Galer, a journalist-creator who's built what she describes as a "50-50 business" between Viralect, her consulting company that trains journalists to think like creators, and her personal brand as a language journalist with nearly one million followers across platforms.

Her latest venture, Sophiana, is an AI-powered app that helps journalists turn articles into short-form video scripts.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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By Natalia Pérez-González

Sophia Smith Galer is the blueprint for the portfolio journalist. “I basically run two businesses,” she told us. “Half is Viralect — consulting, boot camps, Sophiana [an AI app that turns articles into ready-to-shoot video scripts], and half is me as the product: content, writing, presenting, brand deals.”

The revenue splits roughly 50-50, but the time doesn’t: a brand partnership can be quick and lucrative; an investigation might take months for far less pay. The trade — one she’ll take every time — is autonomy for complexity.

After a Broadcast Journalism master's program, she joined BBC in London, first as a social media producer and later as a video journalist, before moving to VICE as a senior news reporter. While honing traditional journalism skills at BBC, she was simultaneously pioneering something her colleagues didn't understand: vertical video explainers on TikTok. She faced institutional resistance from colleagues who dismissed the platform as frivolous — “all lip syncing and dancing” — but kept building her audience anyway.

Sophia’s core presenting rule is simple: be yourself. And for her, the distinction between creator and journalist is accountability: “Journalism is something you do, not something you are.” High-quality doesn’t necessarily mean high-production; it means researched, rigorous, and with integrity.

That ethos is the foundation for Viralect, the consulting company she launched in 2022 after leaving VICE. By then, she’d grown a substantial following on TikTok and could see firsthand how resistant traditional newsrooms remained to video.

Rather than repeat advice one-to-one, she formalized it into consulting programs and audits, turning it into a brisk business. Today, Viralect’s clients range from newsrooms and research bodies to public figures — a chef, a human-rights lawyer — anyone with information worth amplifying. Her first order of business is always an audience-needs diagnostic:

A common blocker she fixes: no clear niche.

She pairs strategy with operations (workflows, bottlenecks, sustainable idea flow) because “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Viralect’s Explainer Boot Camp — a month-long cohort with weekly office hours, a 24/7 group chat, and escalating challenges — turns that into a habit. Alumni have produced viral videos and — more importantly — kept creating long after the program ended.

Though, even with sustained coaching, Sophia noticed the same pain points kept surfacing: journalists wanted to make video but felt short on time and were lacking the technical skills. To test a solution, she built a no-code prototype that automatically condensed articles into short scripts. It worked, and she saw potential for something bigger.

Prize funding from the Georgina Henry Award and ICFJ’s Disarming Disinformation Solutions Challenge allowed her to hire a developer and launch Sophiana in June 2025. The tool is designed to act like what Sophia calls a “critical friend” — giving just enough structure to nudge hesitant journalists into actually making the video.

How it works: you paste in an article, and Sophiana generates multiple hook options, a script, and a built-in teleprompter so you can record instantly. The app now has users in more than 100 countries and offers a free trial alongside paid plans. When using the teleprompter, Sophia recommends breaking the "energy suck" of reading lines by doing multiple takes and leaning into liveliness over perfection.

How she built it: Sophia repurposed her own content library and the questions she kept fielding from clients into proprietary training data. In doing so, she turned consulting insights into a scalable product — a playbook in how creators can scale expertise into infrastructure.

Sophia is pragmatic in her approach to social platforms, each of which serves a different audience and purpose. TikTok built her audience base, Instagram Reels scaled it, and LinkedIn now drives leads. About 70% of her posts are language explainers — bread-and-butter content tied to her focus as a journalist. But whether she’s teaching vertical video in a boot camp, running a pro bono project, or writing her next book (How to Kill a Language, 2026), the principle is the same: integrity first, format second.

A few things that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation:

Connect with Sophia on LinkedIn.
Learn more about Viralect and Sophiana.

Sophia's vertical video strategy strikes a balance between authentic presentation and editorial rigor. Her core principle is to master platform fundamentals and then adapt to emerging opportunities. When Instagram launched Reels, she experienced rapid audience growth by applying skills she'd already developed on TikTok to the new format.

Her approach also prioritizes sustainability over viral moments. She emphasizes that quality content maintains the same research standards and integrity regardless of format, applying identical fact-checking and sourcing requirements whether creating a 1,200-word article or a 90-second video.

"People think they can just take their headline and use it as a hook," Sophia told us. But headlines are designed for different audience behaviors than social media hooks. Her app, Sophiana, generates three different hook options for each article because the opening 3–5 seconds determine whether viewers continue watching.

Headlines work for readers who are already browsing your publication or searching for specific information. Social media hooks need to capture attention from users scrolling rapidly through diverse content who have no prior investment in your story.

Her solution: read the script multiple times before recording, then use the teleprompter as a guide rather than a crutch.

Key techniques:

Sophia dedicates 70% of her content to language explainers. She loves making them, and they’ve become her bread and butter — a staple her audience looks forward to. This consistency allows her to experiment with other content types while maintaining audience expectations.

The principle applies to all content types: establish what your audience knows you for, then build from that foundation.

Platforms change, and successful creators adapt their strategies accordingly. As Sophia reminded us, TikTok used to have a "rough and ready feeling" where you could "randomly do a quick trend, film it and put it out and that would get good engagement."

But as platforms mature and become more saturated, content requirements become more demanding. What worked as casual content five years ago now requires more intentional strategy and execution.

For Sophia, developing fundamental video creation abilities that worked regardless of which platform was trending has sustained her success across mediums.

Sophia's app Sophiana exists because she saw many journalists struggle to flip their articles into videos. Her tool exists to provides structure for beginners; to help them avoid getting bogged down in questions and doubt; to get them filming and uploading as quickly as possible.

The principle applies beyond Sophiana: use available tools and frameworks to get started, but focus on developing the underlying skills rather than becoming dependent on any particular platform or service.