Snapchat is partnering with a new set of publishers: College newspapers.
Snapchat wants to get deeper into news, so it’s adding college newspapers to Discover
Student papers from Berkeley, Texas A&M, Wisconsin and Syracuse are coming to Snapchat.
Snap is bringing “dozens” of college newspapers inside Discover, the section of the app reserved for professionally produced videos and news articles from an exclusive list of Snapchat’s publishing partners.
The student papers will create what Snap is calling a Campus Publisher Story, which should look similar to the magazine-style editions that existing partners like BuzzFeed and ESPN already create daily.
The student papers will produce one of these Stories per week, which will include ads. Revenue generated from the ads will be split between the university paper and Snap, though the company declined to share what that split will be.
Snap is pushing harder to bring actual news inside Discover. In the past two months, Snapchat has launched two daily news shows, one produced by CNN and the other by NBC. Snap was already producing its own political news show called “Good Luck America.”
One likely motivator: More Americans are getting news from social media than ever before, and Snapchat is especially popular with college-aged users. Data released Thursday from Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of Americans get some news from social networks, and 29 percent of Snapchat’s users get some news from the app. That’s up from 17 percent one year ago.
So a good portion of Snapchat’s users want news, and Snap is trying to give it to them.
“School newspapers play a critical role in informing and entertaining their campus communities, and they are often where the many leading journalists and editors that we work with got their start,” Snap wrote on its blog Friday.
Snapchat is starting with four university papers: The Daily Californian from UC Berkeley, The Battalion from Texas A&M, The Daily Orange from Syracuse and The Badger Herald from Wisconsin. A company spokesperson said Snap plans to add more than two dozen total newspapers in the next three months. The Stories will be geofenced so that they are only be available to users physically at each university.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
