LONDON: CNN has become the latest network to launch a daily show just for Snapchat, as it tries to reach a younger audience that increasingly gets its news from social media.
“The Update” will be available from 6 p.m. ET every day and features news stories from reporters and correspondents from around the globe. Lasting between three and five minutes, the show focuses on topics such as climate change, politics and international affairs — issues CNN has found resonate with Snapchat users.
“We are introducing our brilliant cast of world-class anchors and reporters to a young audience in a smart, accessible way with ‘The Update’,” said Samantha Barry, CNN’s executive producer for social and emerging media.
“In today’s news environment, people are hungry for news and they want a quick update of where things are at within one tap of their phone.
“So, we’re serving that up, speaking their language and delivering it in beautiful, vertical, mobile-friendly video.”
CNN was an original Snapchat Discover launch partner and has decided producing its own Snapchat show was the way to go after the millennial audience.
It follows NBC in producing its own Snapchat news show. NBC has seen early success with its twice-weekly show “Stay Tuned,” launched in July, which saw more than 29 million unique users in its first month.
But while figures like that are enough to make any broadcaster salivate, they have not been enough to persuade the BBC to create its own Snapchat show.
The British broadcaster’s social-media focus is fixed on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It now has over 4 million followers on Instagram, whose own “Stories” application is similar to Snapchat.
“We’re funded by license fee, so we have to harness and hone our resources in a way which will make the biggest impact. It’s not worth having a dedicated team of staff on a channel (Snapchat account) that has just 3,000 on for us,” Mark Frankel, social media editor at BBC News, told Digiday earlier this summer.
Recent figures show that Snapchat reaches nine times more 18- to 34-year-olds in the US every day than the top-15 TV networks. Only this month, however, Snapchat’s head of content Nick Bell said the platform was not a “TV killer.”
Speaking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Bell said: “Mobile is the most complementary thing to TV that has been around. We’re really capturing the audience who are not probably consuming TV at the same rate and pace of engagement that they once were.”