Snapchat, the temporary media-sharing app, has quickly become commonplace among news outlets, both through the “Discover” feature and by posting daily stories, much like a typical snapchat user.

The “Discover” feature was released about a year ago, expanding the app beyond sharing photos and videos between personal networks of friends. “Discover” stories allow users to explore daily stories by publication outlets such as Vice, Mashable, National Geographic, Vox and most recently, WSJ. Snapchat Discover stories are structured as a slideshow which the user can swipe through. Usually, each panel is accompanied by a story, which the user can choose to scroll down to read and share with their friends (notably, with the normal drawing / emoji annotations that a user can do with any other snap they send).

What separates Snapchat Discover stories from other web-based posting is that in Snapchat, you can’t link to content anywhere else — the user is forced to consume the story within Snapchat without clicking on external links or enlarging photos. From my personal observations, there seems to be two camps of Snapchat publishing philosophies: one, use each slide for a separate story (like reading the headlines from a newspaper) or two, focus on a particular issue or moment and present different perspectives on that particular story. For example, WSJ tends to present stories in the first format while Vox takes the second approach, using slides to present infographics on a story or quotes from interviewees.

Lately, publishers have been taking to Snapchat to engage with users in a more typical Snapchat fashion by posting daily stories. Users can add publishers by username (for example, “npr”). This particular use of Snapchat lends itself to a more interactive experience — for example, NPR will often explicitly solicit feedback from users viewing a Snapchat story, and users can send photos, videos or text in response. For example, most recently, NPR posted to Snapchat about the Bernie Sanders / Hillary Clinton meme, asking if it was sexist and to reply by “snapping” back. In addition, reporters tend to appear in these stories in a very casual format and basically have conversations (albeit in 10-second segments) about a story that they’re reporting on at the moment.

As for the implications Snapchat has for the future of news and storytelling, it’s clear that Snapchat is a medium which encourages interactivity in a different medium than other forms of social media — not only among friends, but now between users and publications, which previously was a large barrier. Publishing daily “Discover” stories encourages publishers to be deliberate about using only a few slides and tailoring their content to millennials — an issue that is top of mind for publishers today.

I do not come from a background of journalism, but rather one where journaling and voicing various realities is an urgency that lead myself and a lot of people I know into various forms of blogging, formal print, citizen-journalism, etc.

While I feel these forms of non-centric ventures of “telling the truth,” are crucial to the overall local/global narrative, their DIY “aesthetic” has opened much leeway to create fake and misleading content that is presented as truth-from-the-ground. I’m prompted by this example of a Vandalism in Brussels video to propose a possible tool for the newsroom. Before I get into that, the video’s story is similar to many videos that surface on online platforms that end up being debunked as inauthentic. There are two versions of the video, one ending with an “Allah Akbar” scream, and one without. It has been said that the “Allah Akbar” has been added to the video to further feed European Islamophobia. On social media platforms, this is hot stuff, and the “Allah Akbar” version has been viewed over 200,000 times.

With the speed of news and contemporary life, opinions are made on first reads/views without further investigation in the world of the mainstream. I speculate that not more than 10% of the above 200,000 views will rectify their impressions of Islam in Europe. Not a lot of people rectify their views on a lot of political issues on their own without the intervention of the media anyways.

In thinking of a potential tool that could change the newsroom, I would start by expanding the newsroom to include social media platforms as venues of uncurated content as well as traditional newsrooms. While there are a lot of differences, both are confronted with content they need to verify. What if there’s a tool that would automatically notify its viewer both in a media outlet office or in a newsfeed if the video they’re watching was edited or not. I’m not a coder, so I’m not sure how this could be done, but (1) I can draw an analogy with TrueCaller‘s spam alert. TrueCaller is a mobile application that crowdsources its users phonebooks to create a mega caller id system. It has an option to mark certain numbers as spam, and the entire TrueCaller community benefits from this information. Following this logic, this proposed tool could be a plug-in that is fed a binary “edited or not edited” tag to videos on the web by a media-watch crowdsource-operational team. This way, viewers do not rely on their contacts “sharing” a debunked video, but benefit from a global community working on that.

(2) In another presumably more complicated format, this tool could be developed by finding a way to scan a video for recorded natures. If there is a way to pin down whether the audio and the video were recorded together, or by the same device, ruling out doctored videos, then this could also be another way of going about it. In both cases, I see this as a plug-in in platforms where people already view videos as opposed to a specialized site that you need to go and verify videos, mainly due to fatigued audiences that won’t go the extra mile.

Twitter Moments

The internet has completely uprooted the foundations of the printing press. A material company is constrained by how many copies of a certain product it can produce cost effectively. The internet allows for the creation of unlimited copies for no cost at all. With the integration of the internet into people’s lives came the integration of social media into people’s lives. And, brilliantly, Facebook, social-media-gargantuan, has come to incorporate news into their platform, and thus again into people’s lives.
Initially Facebook was much less news based than it currently is. More and more people consult Facebook for their news. The percentage of people who use Facebook for news is up 16% from 2013. Now 63% of Facebook users consume news while on Facebook (http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/news-use-on-facebook-and-twitter-is-on-the-rise/). As Facebook redefines the consumption of news for the average person, other social media groups will likely gain traction as sources of news. When people become more comfortable with the idea of using their social media for news, I suspect Twitter’s “Moments” section will become quite popular. Twitter has a platform that is quick and casual, allowing users to use the mobile app for mere seconds at a time effectively. For better or worse, I see the current direction of news as becoming generally more casual. In order to support that idea, Twitter has a pretty solid news section. Under Moments users can choose between News, Sports, Entertainment, and Fun. Those are some pretty palatable divisions of information, really. Lots of people could probably choose at least three out of four of those sections to just be lumped together under “Fun.” Users can immediately engage in discussion on any topic by tweeting to the hashtag of any event. To open the news section, users touch one button, and then can swipe through different stories.
With such a low barrier of entry and access to immediate interaction and conversation about any given article, I see Twitter’s Moments section as a likely platform/tool to facilitate an ever-more-casual, more prompt news system.