For the retiring ten days , I ’ve been getting my news from Snapchat . I ’ve learned stuff about net dating , celebrity plastic operating theater , Ukraine peace talks , and Bitcoin mine . But mostly , I ’ve learned what old media thinks app media really wants . And it ’s not pretty .
First , some definitional challenges . We used to call photographic print media “ older medium , ” but story keeps materialize and now the term can refer to any turgid medium company that predates Buzzfeed . ( Yeah , bitches , that means Gawker Media is former medium — though we are n’t exactly “ large ” as compared to say News Corp or Time Warner . ) machine characteristic of former media admit thing like : relying on a website or television canal for content distribution , depending on social culture medium like Facebook and Twitter to get attention , and using words like longreads as if they mean something .
App media is the new thing that is making everyone in old medium get their pants in a bunch . Basically , it ’s just any form of self - hold back app that has its own interview — specially on mobile . That ’s where wildly - popular app Snapchat make out in .
Snapchat has over 100 million record users , and last yearthe caller reported that 71 % of their user are under 25.So you may see why sure-enough media and advertisers are dribble over this app . And you may see why , last calendar month , Snapchat declare a new feature called Discover , which delivers tidings from a few select companies — from Vice and Yahoo News to CNN , National Geographic and Cosmopolitan .
Despite the enormous and new audience in bid , Discover is a enormously eldritch development . First of all , Snapchat is n’t a potential vessel for news . The app is best acknowledge for allowing users to send ephemeral selfies and vids to each other . You direct , click , and send to a chum , with the promise that the payload will disappear from their headphone in a few second base ( though there are many way to forbid it from disappearing , aslast yr ’s “ Snappening ” made clean ) . So how does news fit into this app ? Do you keep an eye on a story that disappears after 10 second ? Do video from the Food connection show up with those piffling red “ you ’ve got a message ” boxes in your friend tilt ?
https://gizmodo.com/a-third-party-app-may-have-leaked-tens-of-thousand-of-s-1644811226
That ’s what I wanted to happen out . I ’m a casual user of Snapchat , mostly because I think it ’s always overbold to be honing your skills with weird selfies and cat pics . So when Discover launched , I swiped leave and nose the throbbing purple orchis that takes you to the Discover screen .
Not surprisingly , Discover feels like an entirely different app that was urgently grafted onto Snapchat . It ’s functionality is nothing like anything else in Snapchat , unless you consider swiping go out to be uniquely Snapchatterific . You get a page full of minuscule circles that take news brands , and each one delivers a pretty similar experience . First you get a welcome screen , which is chintzy or friendly look on whether you poked Daily Mail or Yahoo News . Then you swipe through a handful of stories , often with strait and video at the top . When you scroll down into the news report , half the time you discover that it ’s just school text . When you attain the end of the swiping , you get another screen that separate you to come back tomorrow . you’re able to re - read or re - find out this news on Snapchat for 24 hr and then it changes .
Just like a regular newsworthiness cycle , on sometime media .
The fact is , you might as well be reading all this shit on the web . fundamentally all these news organizations took their web news , put a gif with some video at the top , and plopped it into Discover . Not astonishingly , the slickest and most entertaining one belong to to Vice , Comedy Central and Warner Music — but that ’s entirely because these companies are already deft at delivering a multimedia system experience that port nicely to Mobile River . The honour for saddest attempt at relevancy conk out to Yahoo News , which has a dispirited Katie Couric reading their newspaper headline in earnest in her Colorful Internet Newscaster dress . Oh Katie , has it really come to this ? You ’re the spokesperson for Yahoo Discover on Snapchat ?
My compass point is that Snapchat has done nothing new here . Adding affront to injury is the fact they have n’t even made the slightest effort to replicate the playfulness of Snapchat in Discover . I was actually mad to see a ten - 2d news segment that blossom out under the pressure of my fingerbreadth . How would they push the boundaries of the mass medium ? It might be horrifying , but it might be kind of awesome .
Maybe one day it will be awesome , or at least beguiling . Certainly that’swhat John Herrman foreshadow rather darkly in a brilliant essay about app medium on The Awl . He conceive of a uncheerful future where old media , web media , race to grab up with app metier that is always morph into some Modern flesh , port to some raw twist , so that each contemporaries of journalists always regain itself erase in middle age by the churn of new distribution mechanism online .
But properly now , Discover does not embody the promise of app media , nor is it a “ disruptor . ” Currently it ’s sort of like the worst of the nineties AOL walled garden vane , but with video . As Kevin Roose explains over at Fusion , which has its own channel , Snapchat allows no link out . So your news last on Snapchat and that ’s it . News organizations do get a fortune to earn some cash from tax revenue - sharing agreements with Snapchat on advertising , but ultimately the only reason to put your content on there is to boost brand recognition with whatever we ’re go to call the generation that comes up after the Millennials . Again , nothing new to see here .
at long last , what Discover reveals is that the more media changes , the more it stays the same . You have it away who Snapchat is permitting into its special walled garden of Discover ? Old medium . There are no nouveau-riche diarist , no Snapchat natives with their own slant on the news program . It ’s just quizzes from National Geographic , videos of Charli XCX(which — holy dirt I lie with Charli XCX but I can see her on YouTube ) , recipe from the Food web , and adorable , scintillate shabu from Daily Mail and People . As if to underscore this , Vice posted its Discover telecasting of Bitcoin mine on the web — just a solar day after it was on Snapchat . So even the news outlets using Snapchat recognize that they ’re just repurposing web message .
App media is n’t going to destroy old media . It ’s just going to become an extension of old media . The long , crooked fingers of Warner Music and CNN will make into the futurity , aid by Discover and WhipWap and DailyNewsNipple , and whatever comes next . for sure , journalists will be bloody and pushed aside in the operation . But that ’s how we ’ve always done it . bay window amount before humans , specially in the media occupation .
Annalee Newitz is editor program - in - chief of Gizmodo and this is her chromatography column . She ’s ghidorahnotweak on Snapchat , you losers . you may also understand a Bible she write , calledScatter , Adapt and think : How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction .
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