Snapchat Me That News…If It’s Cool
Is Snapchat cool? A lot of younger kids think so but not for news.
Snapchat is used primary by the youth. We are in the demographic as students ages 18–23. We use it for communicate in a fun filled way.
Snapchat is very unique because unlike Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram it is different. With Facebook , Twitter, and Instagram they tend to copy each other’s ideas. But Snapchat has a bunch of cool stuff to it and even tho they have added some new features over the years it has relitively stayed the same with your 10 second maximum and your Snapchat stories. You can still send stuff to individual people as well as post a story for all your snapchat friends to see. I like that that has remained like that through the filters and unlimited replays that Snapchat continues to experiment with.
Snapchat is a very useful tool but not a lot of people look far enough into the tool box to see it.
What works…
or what would work for Journalism on snapchat is the visual aspect. Seeing something with your own eyes is very attractive to any viewer of anything. I think that more news organizations have to take advantage of that. Seeing is believing these days and the fact that you have a 10 second limit on posting stories forces you to be straight and to the point and people like that. People are too lazy today to watch for 10 minutes to figure out what’s happening, they would rather have it in 10 seconds then 10 minutes.
So in all I think more journalists and news organizations need to look into snapchat as a golden opportunity to engage more people by utilizing the tool of snapchat. How to do that is teach journalists in a newsroom to be as straight and too the point as possible and have a strong visual aspect that fills ten seconds that’s all it would take. Another thing that could be a great idea is use a thing like the geofilter which shows your location when you use snapchat. We can maybe set up something where you would get your local news snapchat story based on your location. If we trial this I think we can definitely figure out if it would be worth it, it’s a great concept.
Who is using it now?
There are a few big news organizations that are already on snapchat for example CNN, The Washington Post, and ESPN. Snapchat recently just added this feature of discover in the past year I believe and I’m all for it. There’s a lot of stuff on the discover stories that you don’t see on regular tv. Which is great because you getting it from two different spectrums. More news organizations should do this.
