hochkant — news coverage in portrait mode

»Funk«, or: German public broadcasters attempting to connect with young people. Good approach or cringefest? I followed their »hochkant« format for two months and here’s what I think.

What is it?

hochkant is a Snapchat channel aiming to deliver national and international news on a daily basis. Their coverage includes stories on political issues as well as pop cultural topics.

The channel is usually updated in the morning and in the afternoon. Updates are more frequent in the case of unexpected events, as, for example, when the 2016 Berlin attack took place. They covered the events in the days that followed, including updates by police concerning the arrested suspect, the memorial service that high-level politicians attended and how locals reacted to the attack.

Florian at Berlin Breitscheidtplatz after the terrorist attack in December 2016.

The channel generally switches between informational stills and short explanatory or commenting clips, depending on the urgency of the topic. Apart from Snapchat, stories are also posted to their website. At this point, their content includes among others stories on the free trade agreement CETA, the situation in Aleppo and Snapchat spectacles.

Who’s behind it?

The format is part of Funk, the social media network aimed at 14 to 29 year olds established by German public service broadcasters ARD and ZDF in 2016. The channel is run by three presenters — Salwa Houmsi, Florian Prokop and Eva Schulz — who call themselves »snappers«.

Every story by »hochkant« includes video clips and explanatory stills.

Every now and then, they have guest presenters such as Katharin Tai, a student of international relations who currently studies in Peking and has been reporting on the air pollution in the city.

What I like and what I don’t like

Although the platform is designed to deliver updates in real time, providing context always takes longer than cranking out a speculative tweet . When you follow big news stations, the information hochkant delivers is not very original and the stories they cover are generally rather western-centric.

»hochkant covers both national and international topics. As they are part of the rbb network, they sometimes do stories about specific issues relevant to their Berlin audience.

Although hochkant is part of the Funk network, the content of the channel is definitely rather suitable for an audience between 14 and 18, maybe even younger.

You can tell that this is an effort by ARD and ZDF to be »young« and »hip« and when Florian greets his snapchat followers with »Hallo hochkant!« or Eva pouts into the camera, because children in Aleppo are dying, I really can’t help but cringe on a basis that is a bit too regular for my liking.

Eva, Salwa and Florian regularly include questions and comments that were sent to them by their followers in their story.

German mainstream media are absolutely horrendous at keeping up with and adapting to new news outlets, regardless of whether they are public or private broadcasters. That being said, I think this is a step into a good direction. You can tell that the team is passionate about what they are doing and put a lot of work into creating stories that are interesting as well as entertaining. The format is obviously ideal to provide a bit of context to people with short attention spans, and of course there is the possibility to directly interact with the audience, which the presenters encourage their followers to use especially when they report on complicated or emotionally charged topics. But there remains room for improvement. In all fairness, it’s still early days for hochkant. I’m keen to see how they develop their product.