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Jan. 6, 2016, 2:16 p.m.
Mobile & Apps

The Wall Street Journal is the first American newspaper to get a spot on Snapchat Discover

It’s also the first business-oriented publication on the platform, which has a notably younger audience than the 126-year-old daily.

The Wall Street Journal became the nineteenth publisher to have a channel on Snapchat’s U.S. Discover Wednesday. It’s the first U.S. newspaper and first business publication available on the platform (and the second newspaper overall — the U.K.’s Daily Mail is also there).

The Journal’s Snapchat team consists of five people who will publish eight items each weekday, according to Recode.

So far, the Journal’s Snapchat content seems skewed toward an audience older and more serious audience than other publishers’. Among the offerings on Wednesday were a story on what to expect from CES 2016, a story on the rising average monthly rent for U.S. apartments, and a “Wonk Fact” noting that pay for new graduates has been rising.

As of March 2015, 45 percent of Snapchat’s users were between the ages of 18 and 24, according to comScore — which doesn’t even track users under the age of 18, so those figures leave out Snapchat’s many preteen and teen users. In other words, plenty of the people who might look at this content are nowhere near graduating from college (or even high school) or renting their own apartments.

Snapchat appears to think that’s just fine. “A 19-year-old may not come across what the Iran deal is, but if it’s in their face in Snapchat, where they’re living all day, I kind of see that as a social good,” Snapchat head of news Peter Hamby said last fall. (In that case, he was referring to Snapchat’s Live Stories feature. You get to both Live Stories and Discover by swiping left from Snapchat’s camera screen.)

And this is a long-term bet, according to Carla Zanoni, the Journal’s executive emerging media editor. Snapchat’s reported 100 million–plus users “share many core values with our current readers…we hope to have a long relationship with them,” Zanoni told me in an email.

Zanoni said that that the Journal’s plans for Snapchat include “a mix of core coverage, such as Markets, Business, and World news, and the luxury and lifestyle features that we believe provide the perfect snackable content for this platform.”

And, she added, “When we realized we could repurpose our iconic stipple drawings here, we knew this format would be great for us.”

Laura Hazard Owen is the editor of Nieman Lab. You can reach her via email (laura_owen@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@laurahazardowen).
POSTED     Jan. 6, 2016, 2:16 p.m.
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