It is borderline irresponsible for a blog post to tout NBC's Snapchat initiatives without fitting in a line about how NBC is Snapchat's biggest (perhaps only?) major media investor, to the tune of $500M: https://www.recode.net/2017/3/3/14801168/snap-nbc-investment...
I don't mean to suggest that NBC is futzing the numbers to bolster its investment, just that they have a massive incentive to make things look as rosy as possible. And, on the flip side, they have an incentive to be as innovative in the media storytelling space as possible. Other outlets have Snapchat presences but nothing quite to this scale.
This is great, and I'm not really surprised by its success. The stuff they have on there now is just total, absolute garbage. Right now it's:
"Courtney (one of the karsidhins) is an Egyptian Goddess"
"How Much Porn is Too Much Porn"
"Is this the Big L for Drake"
I just cannot imagine caring about any of this stuff, and it uses a lot of data to just load the previews. It's so annoying I did my first Instagram story this week.
Good to see snapchat is putting together some content that you wouldn't see in a tabloid magazine. I realize I probably sound like an old man, which I am not.
I have a feeling Snapchat is set to go through a sort of "chicken and egg" problem.
Is most of its content geared towards Snapchat's very specific demographic or is their app engineered towards those users' engagement?
Whichever is the case different types of content can't find a target audience, different types of users can't find relevant content because they are not the target audience, so what gives?
Well, the content in Snapchat is more or less what you make of it, and the news stuff in general is a fairly recent addition. So while it's probably a little bit of both, I think Snapchat was mainly used by its current demographic much before this content.
the jumbled up letters and words are readable, but the idea needs to be well known to the user (e.g., it's true that the kardashians are so well known that it's easy to convey the idea).
"This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text."
Huh. I have no problem groking the garbled text, but at the same time I'm pretty much the complete opposite of:
"This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters
in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text.
Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text."
Even before I read the first sentence, my mind does a 'lexing first-pass' and looks at the 'shape' of the text. If a word is misspelled, I'll identify it well before I begin to even gestate the content. Interestingly, I can understand I'm conversational (barely) in Spanish and the trait doesn't carry over. My spoken German is an insult to the language, but I can read it well enough to have the same phenomenon occur in German as well.
> "Courtney (one of the karsidhins) is an Egyptian Goddess"
Did they misspell "Kardashians", or did you? Even the kind of people who would be interested in why a Kardashian is an Egyptian Goddess would presumably notice the misspelling.
I know you want to signal that you're too cool to care about the Kardashians, and I don't care about them either. But it's entirely relevant to the conversation and the attempt to understand what kind of userbase this post describes if NBC isn't even bothering to spell names right in their headline.
The novelty of NBC's move and the reason it's being talked about on HN is that an old media giant is embracing Snapchat's younger demographic. Once you know that any supporting details are largely irrelevant because they only further describe what is already known.
Not sure about this, but Vice's snapchat content is often taken from other Vice publications and then very poorly copied. Lots of spelling mistakes nearly every post.
Weird, I always ignored the news 'show' but this prompted me to watch it and it had nothing that you just brought up. It talked the Barcelona attack, Bannon getting fired, and a couple of other actually worthwhile things. Granted, there were a couple of dumb things (like Taylor Swift's social media disappearing or something), but it still exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations
I misread grepthisab's comment at first. He is saying the things on SnapChat before this new news story are tabloid trash. The news segment is a relief.
You're right, I should be a hyper scientific robot and ignore all anecdotal evidence and personal experience. I will refrain from making any assumptions or criticism of our shallow culture in the future until I have completed extensive research.
I asked my 16 year old nephew 6 months ago how he accesses the news. His answer: Snapchat. I followed that with anywhere else? His response was nope.
There is a lot of potential for using snapchat for news related coverage. Say NBC creates a "become a NBC snap journalist package" available to anyone that requests it. Included is a pin, handheld mic with "NBCx" (or some other visual identifier), something like an AP style guidebook that is simplified, and a concise bit a rules on what is considered news. NBC can sift through these specific accounts, select and publish what's most relevant.
I might sign up for an account if Snap gave me a way to get hyper-local coverage from snap journalists.
>Say NBC creates a "become a NBC snap journalist package" available to anyone that requests it. Included is a pin, handheld mic with "NBCx" (or some other visual identifier), something like an AP style guidebook that is simplified, and a concise bit a rules on what is considered news. NBC can sift through these specific accounts, select and publish what's most relevant.
Sure, why not? We've already completely destroyed the distinction between standards based accountable journalism and blog post rabble rousing thanks to social media "news feeds". This seems like the next logical step.
We've had the tabloid 'yellow journalism' since at least the late 1800s with the Hearst media conglomeration[1]. One could easily make the argument that if it weren't for the US capitalist interests and the tabloids' depiction of the USS Maine going down[2], McKinley wouldn't have approached Congress to seek war. Nonetheless, the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate in the 70s was a case-study in fantastic journalism. More recently, The Rolling Stone's coverage of the financial coverage by Matt Taibbi was better than the NYT's in the late 2000s. The Manchester Guardian broke the Snowden story (which itself was just a masterpiece of journalistic execution, following the Watergate 'staggered release' model).
I thing what is new here is that 160 characters or a Snapchat emoji isn't a format conducive to conveying the nuances behind something as complicated as geopolitical affairs and sectarian violence culminating into factions like ISIS breaking out, due to the vacuum of power which existed after the stereotypical 'despot strongman' gets thrown out, leaving a void of power entirely disrupting two countries, dozens of ethnic groups, leading to three major fronts all vying for power in addition to what can easily be argued as a modern US/Russian proxy war. Sure, a 4 minute feature on NPR won't begin to do it justice, but sometimes you'll get 12 minutes of syndication from the BBC and let Lyse Ducett run with her on-the-ground coverage. If any demographics' primary (or worse,) sole method of news consumption is a 'headlines only' format, as it may be for the 14-21 demographic, I might be slightly concerned.
Tangentially, now that 24 hour cable news exists, you have the converse problem of having too much time to fill, so you'll get talking heads in an echo-chamber[3] consumed by the 65+ demographic. Cronkite and Morrow (and arguably even up to Jennings, which is what I remember watching as a child) at least had 30 minutes of airtime with a captive audience to go into the nuances. (And while the "big 3" were not without their biases, they certainly did an objectively better job than the disservice MSNBC and Fox News is doing.)
[2] While still inconclusive as to the cause, most historians regard this as not an act of war or sabotage but a ship design defect, evidenced by other ships of the same design failing in the exact same fashion.
> we fill the spectrum from terrible to award winning; at least we can choose.
and that's why there's apathy, because you cannot easily tell the difference between award winning and terrible (when the desire isn't to tell the truth, but instead manipulate the public opinion).
If only there's a way for the reputation of a new source to be tarnished for reporting badly...
I understand your complaint but this ship has sailed long ago; a corollary of modern communication and access to information online is that now anybody with an agenda can publish it. The old model of set gatekeepers and Walter Cronkite delivering the trusted news isn't really possible at the moment since we're flooded with information. There are more information sources than one can possibly sort through and you can spend your life in a bubble without realizing it anymore since you can't tell where news came from, who made it, who sponsored it, and so on. You can curate your own news flood, and people happily do to ensure it only has defeatable opposing views and the rest is just reaffirming. We gave up on mainstream media and for some reason decided that rants on YouTube, walls of text on Reddit, and tweets were better.
Actually come to think of it, this might be a really good idea for a distributed ledger for the Associated Press - let whoever report whatever with the AP block chain, but require that the entire "transaction chain" or chain of custody is published with each bit. Make it clear what came from where and how it forked.
> I asked my 16 year old nephew 6 months ago how he accesses the news. His answer: Snapchat.
I mean, I'm 29 and I get all my news from Twitter, Imgur, and HackerNews. Panders to a different demographic, but is ultimately just as bad.
Most news is garbage anyway. Designed to make you anxious so you'll buy more stuff. At least HackerNews doesn't have that motive so it's more interesting on average.
>At least HackerNews doesn't have that motive so it's more interesting on average.
Didn't realize Y Combinator was a charity. HN most definitely exists to sell shit just like everything else. They're pretty good at obfuscating it but it's there all the same.
In Germany (and the same applies to many other countries as well) the majority of people watch public broadcast news every day. It's financed by tax money so there is no profit motive and it's reasonably unbiased. I think a major reason for the current political divide in the US is that both camps have their own sources of information.
From the perspective of a German who follows a lot of american news this seems to be exactly right. I would love to hear from someone originally from the US who follows German news/lives in Germany.
Interestingly there is -in my opinion- an unreasonably high number of people in Germany who are against paying for this state funded broadcast. I think many people don't realize how lucky we are that our media is not (consciously or unconsciously) driving us apart to generate more views/clicks etc.
Just because it doesn't have private shareholders doesn't mean there's no income motive. Executives want to maximize the money they can pay themselves regardless of whether the company distributes dividends.
That's true. I actually don't know how the incentives are structured for executives in the German broadcast but they seem to reward creating quality, unbiased news.
If you look at the most popular newspaper in Germany which is essentially a tabloid it's clear it's not because there is less demand for that kind of trash in Germany.
I'm going to question the reasonably unbiased claim. In the U.S. we have PBS and NPR which are both well left of center and never call into question the size of federal government. If your fundamental political persuasion focuses on individual freedom, responsibility and limited government then state run media is considered very dangerous.
For what it's worth, we do have PBS ("Public Broadcasting Service") over here, which is funded via a combination of taxes and donations. A lot of folks dismiss it as being "left-leaning", though.
Do news outlets even make that distinction? Because I don't think they do. At least not in the broad sense of entertainment as "Content you consume despite complete lack of actionable information"
some news you find out and you're like "Holy shit, I gotta do X and Y and instantly change my behavior". Examples of such news are, "Tsunami barreling towards your city" or "Nukes detected en route to your town" or "Air raid incoming" or even "Draft starting for your target demographic". Or something more benign like "So and so VC is starting a fund for thing you're doing"
Most news, however, gets a reaction closer to "Oh, neat." or "That is outrageous! I must write a Facebook post about how this affects me so people don't forget that I exist in light o this tragedy". Examples of news like this: "Bowie dies" or "Terrorist attack in city 8000km away" or "US gets involved in yet another war that doesn't affect you" or benign things like "VC starts a fund for thing you have zero interest in"
> Most news, however, gets a reaction closer to "Oh, neat." or "That is outrageous! I must write a Facebook post about how this affects me so people don't forget that I exist in light o this tragedy".
Seems like getting most of ones news from "Twitter, Imgur, and HackerNews" would be the primary contributing factor to this myopic worldview.
The main reason I switched to "Twitter, Imgur, and HackerNews" was growing up with watching broadcast news every day. Never once did they report something actionable. Mostly manufactured outrage over things nobody cares about until they see them on the news and then suddenly it's a huge deal.
> News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind.
> —Rolf Dobelli
And a nice quote from Thomas Jefferson on the topic of news:
> “I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”
Why does information have to be immediately actionable? What happened to being generally informed and educated? Jefferson also said:
> > The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.
Celebrity gossip is attention spam, but terrorism and war seem extremely relevant to tax-paying citizens. The corresponding philosophical and ethical questions are also important to consider and debate, those discussions are what change our nation's policies (not elections).
I'll grant that cable news is largely fluff... "President tweets" turns into 8 hours of rehashing the same narrative with a dozen "correspondents" while ignoring the power grab by Venezuela's constituent assembly (interesting parallels in Turkey, and the US) or the progress of different legislation in Congress... but, low quality news still falls in a different category than the endless mindless Snaps and Imgur memes.
Dobelli is talking about that low-quality media: infotainment. The processing, sanitization, and refinement of news into bite-sized dopamine triggers. Hollow snippets that only serve to feed the Dunning–Kruger effect... magnified by commenting and social media, the worst of the worst.
My approach is just to cap the time spent on news. 2x 30 minutes a day I'll dedicate myself to reading news from reputable news agencies, often with a paid subscription, otherwise I just completely ignore news.
> Dobelli is talking about that low-quality media: infotainment.
Yep that's what I was getting at. Non actionable news/information is entertainment.
And I find that the "philosophical and ethical discussion" that comes out of most news is surprisingly shallow and mostly comprised of unchangeable predetermined beliefs and knee-jerk reactions.
Big difference between what snapchat counts as a "view" - just opening a single video - and actually viewing the program, as in watching it for more than second.
Would be interesting to see what 29MM viewers converts into number of minutes of actually viewed content.
But hey, as a vanity metric, 29MM is impressive! =]
Snapchat is using a disingenuous metric here to count views which plays to their advantage; an advantage they wish to exploit as long as they can before their advertisers and content partners wisen up and start demanding a metric that better captures whether the content was consumed to the producer's satisfaction enough to count as an impression.
Right now, this is not as big of a concern because Snapchat's coveted demographic composition and its curated way of working with content partners and advertisers; this results in advertiser self-selection and attracts brand-oriented advertisers with big budgets and less of an acute interest in tracking ROI.
However, once those advertisers look harder at their ROI (like Procter & Gamble [1]) or Snapchat wishes to attract the sorts of SMB advertisers its competitor Facebook can readily attract onto FB and Instagram -- and even struggling Twitter can court -- Snapchat will face increasing pressure to change the way they count views. Facebook, for example, has had a 3-second cutoff before counting a video view for a while, even as they bungled the way they reported metrics [2]. Different platforms have differing definitions on what counts as a view or impression [3].
When they turned pictures into videos it started to make sense to autoplay them. The only reason for that is higher video ad revenue vs static pictures.
We use minutes watched at my company to talk about how much screen time content has as it's much more compelling and accurate than 'views' imo. We just hit 7 Billion minutes watched for last 30 days.
Not sure I agree. Lots of 1-3 second views can easily add up but as an advertiser I'd laugh if you tried to say they were quality views unless you had your logo/CTA at the very beginning. Avg. View duration is just as important to look at, and just as important to compare against the timing of the messaging.
Is any of the news content on snapchat worth watching? Scrolling through their entire offering seems to offer less information than a casual glance at the front page of a newspaper.
Senior digital media guy here. If I were to ask some pointed questions around these claims they might be along the lines of...
- What is the distribution of view durations? Given how Snap counts a view I'd be shocked if more than a small percentage were longer than a second or two.
- How many of these views were paid to increase reach (either directly or via some deal given their investment in Snap)? Most "successful" online videos like this are kicked off with sizeable spend to claim large view counts, get a spike for popularity (which in some platforms can help get organic views)
- What so subsequent views and view duration cohorts look like? I'd be shocked if there wasn't steep drop off.
- What is the distribution of account age for these viewers? This could flag less sophisticated fake account creation if there was any padding going on.
Holt's numbers are for 30 minute views of roughly five minutes of news, if there's enough going on not to require filler, ten minutes of complimentary copy, political preaching to the choir, and video news releases, and finally fifteen minutes of advertising. The snapchat thing is for starting 30 second videos. They're providing a similar amount of news content after all the corrections are applied.
Also all social media services have purchased content and purchased clicks available. Its impossible to estimate how many of the 29 million are bots or purchased traffic.
Combined, Holt has a larger reach, at least for now.
I'm confused -- i thought Snapchat was for sending pictures that get auto-deleted. I'm honestly not sure how to even keep up with this stuff anymore, other than installing everything and using it, which i don't have the time or inclination for.
So it looks like those kinds of news is not tailored to the user, right?
What's interesting is how beneficial is the news curated by an ML algorithm. If we optimize the content presented to the user by the metric of his engagement, that a slippery slope, as we know that the majority of people would unconsciously click on click-bait articles which might not be the most interesting, relevant or beneficial for them. Moreover, there is a risk of opinion bias, as we clearly seen with Facebook during the recent US presidential campaign.
Which in turn raises the question: "Is consuming news (even if tailored to your preferences) is the best way to have a well-rounded view of the world"?
I'm not familiar with Snap but I recently downloaded Instagram for the first time and, despite 99% of the content being "look at how cool I am!", I did find a regional news station (from Spain) that only posts 30 second clips of local news. It's akin to Great Big Story on YT, in the way that it gives you just enough info to see if you're interested (at which point you can look up more about whatever it is online).
I'd love to find more IG accounts like this but I'm not sure news clips via IG is actually a thing.
I don’t know if it’s something in recent events (I presume not) but it’s disappointing HN can’t have a conversation around popular culture topic without descending into calling part of the population “vapid” or whatever. Can’t we just accept people like different things. I like ruby. Maybe you don’t.
It's just eugenics propaganda, although you can make the case for that interpretation to be unintended.
Good comedians never let facts or good taste get in the way of good jokes, and Idiocracy has some interesting observations, but the framing device is repugnant.
Probably forever, yet they could have been right all along.
(No way to know subjectively, we weren't alive that whole time! E.g. I hear tales of evening strolls that entire towns would conduct after dinner hours, stopping on those front porches that we no longer use. Many towns seemed like ongoing parties 100 years ago. No more of those!)
I don't mean to suggest that NBC is futzing the numbers to bolster its investment, just that they have a massive incentive to make things look as rosy as possible. And, on the flip side, they have an incentive to be as innovative in the media storytelling space as possible. Other outlets have Snapchat presences but nothing quite to this scale.