Snapchat open on a mobile device. Image: East pop/Shutterstock
Snapchat is creating a news partnership scheme to give journalists new ways to uncover content they can use in their work.
Snapchat is partnering with four news discovery and aggregation firms to give journalists tools to allow them to find Snap content and videos relating to breaking news stories.
According to Axios, the companies involved are Storyful, NewsWhip, SAM Desk and Tagboard.
News organisations with subscriptions to the above companies’ tools will have full access to all publicly available Snaps, the same as their current levels of access to public Facebook and Twitter data.
News companies won’t be charged extra for the Snapchat data as the social network will be providing it to the aggregators and discovery platforms free of charge.
Tools for journalists
Founder and CEO of SAM Desk, James Neufeld, said: “The geography data from Snapchat is really trustworthy compared to other platforms, and it can be very targeted, which makes the content complement text-based journalism on Twitter really well. Using our AI, journalists can combine the two sets of data to find facts and break news that much faster.”
This scheme is part of a more generalised Snapchat campaign to make its content more widespread outside of its proprietary app, in the hopes of enticing new users to join as well as prompting existing users to engage with public content on Discover Stories as well as Snap Maps.
Rahul Chopra, a former Storyful executive, will lead the initiative. Chopra is the current head of Snap’s Stories Everywhere feature. Chopra said: “Even though this is a tool for journalists, I do think publishers and media organisations will find this useful, because it gives them access to footage during breaking news situations that is otherwise very expensive to obtain on their own.”
A Snapchat-Amazon collaboration
In other company collaborations, Snapchat announced earlier in July that it will be building a visual product search feature codenamed Eagle, which will deliver users to Amazon listings.
According to TechCrunch, app researcher Ishan Agarwal found the code for the hidden feature. This feature, if launched, would create another revenue stream for Snap, which has been suffering in recent months following an unpopular redesign and a $385m loss posting last quarter.
Snapchat open on a mobile device. Image: East pop/Shutterstock
