Snapchat is getting its first daily news show in partnership with NBC News.
“Stay Tuned” will air at 7AM and 4PM on weekdays and 1PM on weekends, according to the user’s local time zone. The episodes will be 2 to 3 minutes long and current news topics and pop culture events in the vein of NBC Nightly News. There will also be breaking news segments when necessary.
“If something happens in the world, we want people to go to Snapchat,” Snap head of original content Sean Mills said in a statement to CNBC.
“NBC is making a big commitment — they are saying we are going to build a big team that is dedicated solely to this show, we’re going to produce it every day. That’s a pretty huge undertaking right out of the gate, and that’s all about engagement and helping our community build a daily habit.”
NBC News hired a team of 30 journalists to staff the new series and will be leading ad sales, with an undisclosed revenue split with Snap, the parent company of Snapchat. The launch sponsor is STX Entertainment.
“NBC News had been experimenting on our own channels on Snapchat for awhile and during the election found that our Snaps were getting picked up by Snapchat’s Election Night stories more than most media organizations,” said NBC News Group director of digital communications Emily Passer. “We found we had a real knack for producing content for this platform and were impressed with the engagement we were seeing. From there, the idea for a specific show, and later a daily show, was born.”
“Stay Tuned” marks Snapchat’s 16th original series, and comes at a time where Snap’s competitors Facebook and Twitter have been ramping up their original show efforts as well. Currently there are five shows airing on Snapchat, with the majority airing once a week. The company aims to have three shows per day by the end of the year.
This isn’t Snap’s foray into hard news. Snap produced its own political show called “Good Luck America,” whose audience has grown 53 percent between its first and second season, the company says. It’s also featured news content from news publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post, and claims more than 35 million viewers followed its 2016 Election Day coverage on Snapchat, according to Snap.
Daily active users visit Snapchat more than 18 times each day and spend over 30 minutes daily on the platform, per Snap.
“The Snapchat audience cares deeply about what’s going on in the world and they want to know more,” Mills said in a statement to CNBC. “What they care about are the issues: climate change, gun violence, immigration, how they’re going to pay for college. We see real spikes when we cover issues that they care about.”
– Additional reporting by Julia Boorstin.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC and NBC News, is an investor in Snap.
Source: Tech CNBC
You can now watch your daily news on Snapchat