ONA Issues

socialmediadesk:

This is Vesta Partovi’s valedictory post for the SMD Tumblr. We’ve had a string of standout interns and Vesta continued that tradition, bringing passion, intelligence and humor to our little operation. Thanks Vesta! – Wright

---

Has your Snapchat game evolved? Ours has.

Ever since it launched in 2011, the app has been evolving in unexpected ways. For media organizations like us, it’s been a twisty, turny ride. Recently, I was asked to do brownbag presentation at NPR about my storytelling approach on Snapchat. Here’s what I’ve learned over the last four months!

Before I dive into our current process, though, I think it’s important to talk about how Snapchat itself has evolved. In the beginning, it was just a 1) communication tool. I Snapped you (text, photo, photo + text). You Snapped me back. There was maybe a video Snap in there. You could throw on some emojis. It was a glorified iMessenger, with the benefit of ephemerality.

Things changed when Snapchat launched Stories in 2013. Now, your communication wasn’t just one-to-one, or one-to-a few. It was one-to-many. Those many were your friends – that is, if you had them on Snapchat.

With Stories, Snapchat becomes a 2) medium for public, visual storytelling. You know, like how print, radio, or video are storytelling mediums. Snapchat provides the tools (in-app recording, illustrating and asset-stitching), as well as the interactive platform to view it all in. Now I’m not recording random hilarities in the street and sending them to individual contacts. I’m constructing a visual Story on Snapchat, and slapping it up for all my friends to see.

Now, anyone can make a Story. And they can get creative! Before NPR, I teamed up with a friend for a Story series that involved us snapping our unenthused, stuffed fox’s reactions to what he saw in a parade of art galleries. (The fox’s name was Eugene, if you’re wondering.)

NPR can also make Stories. NPR, however, is not your average user. As national media organizations, who are in the business of, well, media, jumped onboard, Snapchat was quick to adapt.

Almost one year ago, Snapchat launched Discover, making it an official 3) distribution platform for editorial content. Other content distribution platforms? Facebook. Twitter. Youtube. Netflix. Your Television. Nbd. Discover is the most unexpected thing to come out of Snapchat so far. It is now a player in the news space.

NPR, however, is not on Discover. We’re still using Stories to reach an audience on Snapchat and our relationship with our followers looks like this:

So, as Snapchat was adjusting who they were, we were tweaking what we did on the platform. This timeline summarizes our progression on the swerving Snapchat trail:

[You can find the corresponding Sandbox posts from the timeline below:

• Fact of the Day (Alexander McCall)
  
• Experimenting w/ Snapchat for News (Tajha Lanier)
  
• Tajha + Wright’s tinkerings
  
• Tajha’s takeaways
  
• Making an Engaging Story (Aggi Ashagre)]
  

Now for my part. When I came to NPR, with a background in filmmaking, I focused on our approach to storytelling on Snapchat.

It involves four main concepts:

And the following steps:

The team that works to make this happen looks exactly like this: 

Note: NPR only hires stick figures

When we work together well, we make content like this:

Other Stories we’ve done have included a breakdown of an NPR newscast — from pitch to broadcast — and an informative look at the technology developed to help women with their periods. These two Stories are great examples of collaboration. They were both pitched to us from NPR units outside the Social Media Desk (Newscast and the Science Desk, respectively). Here’s a timeline of the Stories I worked on during my time at NPR, all of them featuring collaboration with journalists across the organization:

How has this new approach to Snapchat been doing? Really well. We get a lot of great, in-app feedback from our viewers, each time we post a Story. We even hear about it on Twitter, where they also tell us how much they love our Storytelling!

With the method outlined above, we now have a system for creating audience-engaging, Snapchat-native content. We still haven’t found a way to deliver on our audience’s biggest request, which was to post more often. I think it’s clear, however, that NPR has more room to grow on Snapchat.

- Vesta

Love these insights into how NPR has been thinking about Snapchat.