Snapchat and the Dawn of Citizen Journalism

Snapchat recently launched the “Snap Map” feature for all users around the world. This feature provides a map-based interface to Snapchat which enables us to view the location of our friends as well as major events happening around the world. Snapchat, which was originally known as a self destructive picture sharing app, has now grown into a global storytelling platform.

Although a bit creepy, Snapchat’s new Snap Map lets you see the location of all your friends on a map — provided your friends are not on Ghost Mode (location sharing with friends is disabled). Your friends are represented with their Bitmojis, which is basically your disturbingly similar virtual avatar. Snapchat acquired Bitmoji almost a year ago and it has now redefined its purpose of existence.

Besides your friends’ locations, you can also see snaps of people from various hotspots or popular destinations from around the world. Haven’t been to Eiffel Tower yet? No worries, you can open your Snap Map and see realtime snaps from tourists who visited the Eiffel Tower in last 24 hours. Missed the Migos concert in your area? That’s okay, you can swipe to the area where concert is happening and view the stories shared in realtime by all the other concertgoers. Want to check out what capital of Kazakhstan looks like? Go swipe all the way to Astana, Kazakhstan on the Snap Map and just tap on the hotspot in the area — that place is pretty strangely modernized.

Snapchat has provided a medium for people to efficiently share up to 10 second brief updates from any major live events from around the world. People who are avid Snap users can open their Snap Maps and view all the major events that are happening around the world from the eyes of the people who are present right there — first person narrative.

Very recently Snap Map showed news coverage of fire in different parts of the United States. On June 27th 2017, there was a subway derailment in NYC, which was extensively covered on Snapchat by people who were facing delays and disruptions due to this incident. This was shown as a “Featured Story” in NYC on Snap Map.

These screenshots were taken from the Featured Story reporting the fire in Marco Polo Condominium in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The intensity and seriousness of the fire was well captured by various people present around this location. Snapchat then allowed news platforms to use these curated snaps and report the verified facts as news captions on these snaps. At the moment, not very much information is available as to how logistically Snapchat enables these news outlets to leverage user generated content to report news stories. My guess is Snapchat is currently working closely with the news and media outlets to test and further develop a content management system specially for their platform.

This is a huge shift from the traditional form of journalism as we know it towards a more autonomous and crowdsourced system. Snap users are now empowered to report a news story if they are present anywhere around the area where the incident is occurring.

This idea of reporting and distributing news by public citizens with access to reporting mediums is popularly known as Citizen Journalism. The prevalence of social media tools, faster internet, and high quality smartphones has enabled people to often report breaking news faster than trained journalists. This notion was widely talked about during the 2012 Occupy Wall Street protests when various video bloggers used YouTube and Facebook to report details about the protests live and widely share it across all social media platforms.

Although we’ve been seeing examples of citizen journalism regularly on all the social media platforms for a while, Snapchat has now given a proper structure to this concept and made it very accessible for people to report news event. You simply need to take snaps if you’re present in the area of a major news event and add it to the relevant Featured Story.

In spite of a lot of people regarding Citizen Journalism as a revolutionary concept, it is met with equal amount of criticism by journalism experts who regard it as amateur and subjective.

News companies spend a lot of dollars and hours to send their reporters at the location to report a particular news event. Given the logistic hassles involved in this approach, sometimes it can be impossible for these news reporters to cover an incident accurately and effectively. This problem is largely solved by leveraging the user generated news content shared by people who are present right at the site of the news incident.

Sharing videos/ images through Snapchat sort of guarantees that the content is authentic. There are less chances of doctoring or fabricating content on Snapchat due to almost no major editing features provided on the platform — it’s basically shoot and share.

Citizen journalism is often regarded as subjective and biased by journalism experts. This is primarily because ordinary people are not aware of the journalism ethics and don’t properly understand the importance of objectivity in news reporting. However, the degree of subjectivity is tremendously reduced on Snapchat where people are given only 10 seconds for each snippet of visual they would like to distribute. Along with the short duration, the news content is clubbed with similar snaps shared with all the other Snapchat users present at the same location. This provides the news story with the popular validation by the people present at the site of the incident. News reported from the lens of one person can be biased but if the same piece of news is reported by 20 other people present at the same location then the possibility of it being biased goes down significantly.

Although this idea seems revolutionary at first, it does have a lot of implications on the future of traditional journalism. It raises an important question — Is it okay to trust public citizens reporting the news (decentralized) or do we put our trust in an expert (yet centralized) news entity?

It is no doubt that the expert journalists will face a lot of competition from citizen journalists who have a good grasp on how Snapchat works along with a huge audience. Nonetheless, traditional journalists need to be more creative as well as collaborative while using Snapchat to report news and leverage the user generated content to their advantage.

At the very core of journalism is the collection and distribution of reports from important events from around the world — events that impact our society to some extent. Snapchat and other social media networks are empowering the public to gather information and distribute it on their own. This is somewhat making the work of traditional journalists easier — they just need to know how to seamlessly adapt to this new structure.

All of these are important questions which we won’t be able to answer right now. We’ll have to wait and see how Snapchat’s news reporting model evolves in the future. Nonetheless, what’s extraordinary is how Snapchat progressed from a simple peer-to-peer self-destructing messaging app to a powerful global storytelling platform providing an entirely new mechanism for media companies to interact with the consumers. With our attention spans sharply declining, the wide usage of Snapchat shows the power of brevity, simplicity, and 10 second news updates.

Hit that 💚 down there if you read this far down and found this move by Snapchat fascinating.

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