News Consumption Findings
To document and make sense of these contradictory processes, my research centers on using 1136 x 640 pixels to process most of my information. The majority of news consumption comes from the cellular device, and more importantly, from various social media apps such as Snapchat, Facebook, and Reddit apps.
Although these apps were intended to be used to converse with friends or other app users, these companies have revamped their apps to navigate users to newsworthy information that can be commented on or shared.
An example of this is Snapchat’s newest feature, Snapchat Discover.
This platform is filled with 15 well-known media brands creating a deceptively large amount of content. Each channel creates an edition that’s a few minutes long, and a new one is released every 24 hours. If the user holds down on a 7-second long snap, the web article slides up onto the screen, with the entire story displayed. A button at the top allows the user to go back to the Snapchat app at anytime and return to where they left off on their “Snapchat discover story”.
This revolutionized click bait properly finds a way to grab a user into a story in only seven seconds, and does it well. As a student journalist pitching stories in a matter of minutes, I find this educational for my studies, and try to apply this in each of my content. Within each story I create, I am frequently thinking of a way to grab a reader visually in only several seconds.
Another form of revolutionized news in the world of social media is the art of turning a story into a conversation. Judging by my findings, the pieces that took up most of my time were those that were either sent to me, or tagged with my name upon it. An example of this was the breaking news of ESPN opening up an eSports program within their company. As many understand that this fascinates me, several friends brought this to my attention, and provoked several conversations with news articles covering the same information.
Due to Facebook providing only room for links sharing content to have a single featured picture and a sub headline, news outlets must leave these spaces for the most conversation starting pieces of information. This could be either the lead of the story, or a question that draws the reader into finding out the answer, and then sharing to allow their friends to find the same answer. News still contains its informative format, but the thought process on how to spark interest has changed tremendously.
The worst part of these findings is realizing that news is not obtained from a single outlet anymore; your brand is no longer the major part of your identity. Social Media has mashed all of these outlets together in a single app or website, challenging media to reframe from using their brand, and now using their visualization and conversational format to entice a loyal audience into every piece to be shared, liked, or commented on as the new hit topic for small talk.
