Snapchat CEO: The way we find and read news online is totally broken
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel talked about his company at a fireside chat at the University of Southern California on Wednesday.
In addition to discussing why his company wants to get into music, Spiegel talked about how other platforms, like Twitter, encourage poor news consumption and journalism tactics.
“The first [problem with feed based media is that] the fastest story wins and that means a lot of times, you make mistakes because you’re in such a hurry to get things on the internet,” Spiegel said, according to USC’s Daily Trojan.
“We also found that headlines were driving distribution to different websites in the feed to try and attract people to click on them,” he added.
Spiegel said during his fireside chat that Snapchat is better for news organizations’ branding efforts than Twitter, too. Unlike Twitter, he says, Snapchat Discover clearly shows users from where they’re getting their news.
“We also saw that brands were kind of losing their value because on Twitter, the brand wasn’t really so important and people weren’t paying attention to where they were reading their news,” he said.
“So we tried to build something that tried to bring back the editorial perspective, because we believe it’s really valuable to have someone who’s smarter than us figure out what’s important, because that’s a full time job and a really hard one.”
Snapchat launched its new Discover feature, which lets users view Snapchat Stories from brands including Comedy Central, ESPN, and National Geographic, in January. It’s Snapchat’s first foray into serving as something other than a messaging service by dipping into news. After 24 hours, Snapchat Discover’s content disappears and is replaced with new stories.
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