Categories: OLD Media Moves

Why the WSJ loves Snapchat

Lucinda Southern of Digiday writes about the Wall Street Journal’s experience on Snapchat Discover since it was added in January.

Southern writes, “The WSJ’s team creates five Snapchat original stories a week, made up of a daily edition of eight snaps of different stories, around the verticals of business, markets and technology. The tone is a bit more descriptive and much more visual. Each edition is published at 7 a.m. E.T.

“Readers spend about 30 seconds per snap, and a surprising number each day are making it to the end of each edition (and so also viewing the ads), according to Marshall, who declined to go into specifics on the numbers.

“Viewing each edition as a whole, like a TV or radio bulletin, has helped the Journal find the right mix of stories. ‘Looking back at some of our earlier tests I can see we didn’t make them flow well,’ Marshall told Digiday. ‘There were too many different types of stories that took the reader in too many different directions.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.