Snapchat adds entertainment and news with Discover

Snapchat is aiming to become much more than a social media app by making content from the likes of Vice Media, Cosmopolitan magazine and CNN available to users.

Discover is billed as “a new way to explore Stories” that “puts the narrative first. This is not social media.”

The company, best known for its self-destructing photo and video messages, also claimed that Discover differed from other platforms because it was “built for creatives”.

As the youth media brand seeks to reach new audiences, Vice will make its Daily Edition available on Discover, featuring breaking news and fresh musicians, artists and personalities.

Cosmo is another of the 11 media channels that will deliver new content daily to the app’s 100m users.

Exclusive content will be created for Snapchat by the magazine’s editors and uploaded to the app as a daily “edition”, with five articles for users to swipe through. Each edition will be available for 24 hours.

DailyMail.com will also partner with Snapchat and offer users 10 to 15 of its “highly addictive stories” news, showbiz and lifestyle stories curated by a dedicated editorial team.

Stories will be either full articles or the best video stories of the day, said Martin Clarke, editor-in-chief of DailyMail.com - which recently rebranded from MailOnline.com.

Evan Spiegel, Snapchat chief executive, said his company was “huge fans” of the website - the world’s most popular English language newspaper site.

Other partners include Yahoo! News - giving further exposure to its new signing Katie Couric - Comedy Central, the Food Network, CNN and National Geographic.

Discover is part of Snapchat’s grand plans to start making money from its young and highly engaged user base, alongside the ads that already appear within the app’s Recent Updates screen.

Snapchat’s media ambitions were first revealed last August by the Wall Street Journal, which predicted a November launch for “Discovery” with news articles, videos and advertisements.

In November, Digiday provided an update, claiming that Snapchat was in talks with a number of media organisations to be part of the new feature.

Meanwhile, leaked emails from Sony Pictures – whose chief executive Michael Lynton is on Snapchat’s board – hinted at the company’s ambitions to launch a digital music service, although that does not appear to be part of Discover at its launch.

The leak prompted Spiegel to write a memo to staff explaining that he was “definitely angry. definitely devastated” at the plans being made public ahead of time.

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