NBC* is used to creating news programming for television. But young people don’t watch much television, at least not compared to their parents. Instead, they’re hanging out on Snapchat.
NBC has 30 employees working on a daily news show exclusively for Snapchat
It’s the first time a publisher has created a daily show for Snap.
Michael Nagle / Getty
At least that’s what NBC hopes, and it’s why the network announced on Wednesday that it will begin publishing a twice-daily news show exclusively on Snapchat.
The show, called “Stay Tuned,” will appear in Snapchat’s “Discover” section in the morning and evening each weekday, and once on Saturdays and Sundays. The general news show will feature four or five big headlines, and each episode will be about two and a half minutes in length.
“This is a different audience than typically finds us,” said Nick Ascheim, NBC News’ digital chief. “There’s a generation of people, many of whom are the so-called cord-nevers or cord-cutters — we want to bring NBC news to those people as much as we’ve been bringing [it] to television audiences for decades.”
Snap and NBC will split revenue from ads sold alongside the show, and NBC is fronting all of the production costs, which includes two anchors — Savannah Sellers and Gadi Schwartz — and a crew of 30 full-time employees.
“The vast majority of [the crew] is hired new,” Ascheim said, adding that all of them have experience in the news industry and all of them will work exclusively on this show. “We are absolutely not dumbing down the show.”
“These are the most important stories of the day, and we are not going to change the story lineup just because it’s a younger audience.”
Since late last year, Snap has been making a push into short video shows, which are highly produced but exclusive to Snapchat and its young audience. The company has inked deals with a number of publishers for these shows, including the NBA and the BBC.
But NBC, which is also an investor in Snap, is the first publisher to create shows for Snapchat on a daily basis, which is in line with Snap’s vision for how these shows will play out long-term. The app features about one show per day right now, but Snap wants to be at three shows per day by the end of the year, according to a spokesperson.
For Snapchat, the question is whether or not it can become a legitimate media destination: A modern-day MTV where young people can come watch or read things they can’t find anywhere else online.
Publishers, on the other hand, are trying to reach the audience that Snap caters to: Young people who don’t watch cable TV or read print magazines. The combination has led Snap to partner with all kinds of media companies on weekly video projects like Shows, and daily digital magazines, which Snap calls “editions.”
Some of Snap’s editions reach millions of viewers per day. In 2016, Snap paid out roughly $58 million to its media partners as part of rev-share deals tied to all of this content.
Snap is not the only company trying to get into original, short-form video. Facebook is also talking to publishers and Hollywood types to try and get exclusive videos for its app.
* NBCUniversal is also an investor in Vox Media, which owns this site.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
