Dear Peter Hamby: My Suggestions for Snapchat’s News
Snapchat’s Head of News, Peter Hamby, video chatted with my Northeastern Digital Journalism class this week. As a follow-up assignment, my classmates are writing about their news diets, their use of Snapchat’s live stories and discover options and their suggestions.
Here’s my take:
News diet
The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, NK News, Shanghaiist and other news organization’s articles that may appear in my social media feeds.
The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and NK News tend to be the only sites that I visit without referral from social media. I do not have any apps downloaded specifically for news consumption.
Snapchat Live Stories
I have yet to access Snapchat during one of its breaking news situations, but I occasionally click on the live stories when I have time to kill waiting for the train or for class to start. My favorites so far have been the live stories about certain cities or countries (i.e. Iceland live story) and, more recently, some of Snapchat’s political coverage. It’s genuinely fascinating to me that I can now see a crowded room from the perspectives of several people within it, though I question how an individual could use these stories as staples in their news diets. Nevertheless — as we discussed during class– there are millions of young people using Snapchat a day and these live stories could potentially stimulate their curiosities enough to search online for a full story regarding something they’ve seen.
It would be interesting if Snapchat could start hiring journalists for multimedia pieces that write these stories more traditionally, which could be linked from the live stories. Maybe a user could click or move their hand in a specific motion on the screen when they see a portion of the live story they like, and then once the story is finished, the app can redirect to a written story with more in-depth coverage.
Snapchat’s “Discover”
I will be honest — I’ve used Snapchat’s “discover” no more than twice. In the past, I’ve tapped them and abandoned because I found them confusing to navigate. Last night, I tried CNN’s “discover” option and saw a beautifully-designed story about Muslim Americans. I appreciated the music that accompanied it and the flow of the story.
However, a few swipes in, there was a “talking head” type of video that was far more than the average snap and I quickly became disinterested. Though I think the length of the video has something to do with it, the individual on the camera wasn’t particularly commanding in her speech and it felt a little too much like television news; It seemed that the creators were going for an exclusive, behind-the-scenes type of feeling, but the authenticity of it all was lost in its inability to be interesting. I would have rather read the creator’s explanation following, say, a 5–10 second video of her introducing herself. I might have felt differently if she was walking through the CNN building while talking instead of sitting at her desk — as a video editor, the lack of movement and composition in her video in combination with its length made it difficult to watch.
For social media interactions and live stories on snapchat, users like myself are more forgiving of Snapchat’s lower production values — that’s part of the charm. But for the elaborate productions in the “discover” option, there are higher expectations brought on by the clear use of professional graphic designers and developers who invested in the stories to make them more experiential and video game-like. Therefore, when a piece of the story seems out of place as with CNN’s talking head, it’s off-putting.
It would also help to have shorter splash screens (or maybe my phone is just old) and to design the Discover icons in a way that shows the story it’s currently running. Given that the splash screens are long, I want to know what exactly I’ll be getting by clicking CNN; if anything, that would make me use Discover more option.
The way Discover is organized now, I am asked to choose my favorite media outlet when, instead, I’d rather choose the story that most interests me. Though I’ve consumed news from all of these organizations and channels outside of Snapchat and could have built a loyalty, I’m more likely to use Discover if I have a menu of headlines, not sources.
