Snapchat as a News Source

In the past few years, Snapchat has gathered a following of over 300 million monthly users, which when compared to Facebook's 2.01 billion monthly active users that number may appear small. In reality, Snapchat is massive, being used by 41% of all people 18-34 years old in the United States.

With this massive amount of people that are using the social media platform, naturally news and entertainment outlets were drawn to it. But, just because big names like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall street Journal are on it does not mean that the content that is provided is of high quality. In fact, most of the conventional news articles, or stories that you would normally find on a social media site, or online are either behind a half dozen swipes, or are nonexistent in some cases. Coming from someone who works closely in the journalistic process, I find it troubling that such a large platform is being underutilized in this regard. For example, on today's featured list, the top seven stories are completely unrelated to conventional news stories and is pertaining solely to celebrity gossip and click-bait type articles often seen on Buzz Feed, although Buzz Feed does describe itself as a social news and entertainment company, so this is forgivable on this end.

What I don't see as forgivable at least from a news perspective, is that a harder hitting news story is often far into the featured and generally not seen in the top four articles. I do however, think this can be attributed to the audience that these outlets are trying to target. Traditionally speaking, the outlets could be trying to tailor their content to suit the general idea that the 18-34 age group is more interested in celebrity gossip and articles like that. Even though this may be true, I do feel that at this point in time, Snapchat is something that I'm going to avoid using for any searching for current events and news, because even though I use Snapchat a ton throughout the day and it's extremely intuitively designed, I find it easier to see the news on other platforms and mediums.

Lastly, I saw a post about Snapchat stories in general over on Olivia's Opinions that gave me the idea for writing about this and I wanted to give her credit for that.