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.”
CNN turns to Snapchat to reach a younger audience
CNN turns to Snapchat to reach a younger audience
Jailed French journalist files appeal in Algeria’s top court: lawyers
- Gleizes was arrested in May 2024 after traveling to Tizi Ouzou in northeastern Algeria’s Kabylia region — home to the Amazigh Kabyle people — to write about the country’s most decorated football club, Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie
ALGIERS: French journalist Christophe Gleizes, sentenced to seven years behind bars in Algeria on terror-related charges, has filed an appeal seeking a new trial with the country’s highest court, his lawyers said Sunday.
“Christophe Gleizes registered an appeal at (the court of) Cassation” on Sunday, the deadline for filing, his French lawyer Emmanuel Daoud told AFP in a message, declining to comment further.
Gleizes’ Algerian lawyer Amirouche Bakouri made a similar announcement on Facebook.
Earlier this month, an Algerian appeals court upheld the seven-year prison term for the sportswriter, who was first convicted of “glorifying terrorism” in June.
Gleizes was arrested in May 2024 after traveling to Tizi Ouzou in northeastern Algeria’s Kabylia region — home to the Amazigh Kabyle people — to write about the country’s most decorated football club, Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie.
In 2021, he had met in Paris with the head of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), a foreign-based group designated a terrorist organization by Algiers earlier that year.
At this month’s appeal hearing, Gleizes had said he did not know the MAK had been listed as a terrorist organization, and asked the court’s forgiveness for his “journalistic mistakes.”
The court’s decision to uphold his sentence was denounced by the rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), as well as the French government.
Gleizes’s jailing comes at a time of diplomatic friction between Paris and Algiers that began last year when France officially backed Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region, where Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front.
He is currently France’s only journalist imprisoned abroad, according to RSF, and French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to work toward his release.
Mother makes plea
The mother of the jailed journalist Christophe Gleizes wrote a letter to Algeria’s president requesting he pardon her son from his seven-year sentence on terror-related charges.
“I respectfully ask you to consider granting Christophe a pardon, so that he may regain his freedom and his family,” Sylvie Godard wrote in the letter, which was dated December 10 and seen by AFP on Monday.
“Nowhere in any of his writings will you find any trace of statements hostile to Algeria and its people,” she wrote in her letter to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
