A Tale Told in 36 Snaps
What does it take to show 8,800 people, in one day, how a story comes together for All Things Considered?
A bunch of people. And Snapchat. We did it last week.
It all started as a lark: Digital Media recently hired Ben Schein (left) to work on the NPR News app. We wanted to give him a meaningful newsroom orientation, so we decided to follow a story from start to finish – on all its platforms. Since we know NPR fans love to peek behind the curtain, we documented all of it on Snapchat (our account is “nprnews”). We were curious to see if people would follow along.
Here’s how it worked: On Wednesday morning, Alison MacAdam and I looked at the All Things Considered story list and selected a Dan Charles piece about Australia’s drought lessons for California. Dan, his editor Alison Richards and the ATC staff graciously agreed to let us follow them around all day to record the writing, editing, recording and production of the piece.
We updated NPR’s Snapchat throughout the day with photos and videos that explained each step of the piece’s journey. By 6 p.m. it had aired on ATC, was published on The Salt, in available in NPR One. The whole journey was condensed into a four-minute Snapchat story, comprised of 36 individuals snaps (both photos and short videos). It was watched 8,800 times in the 24 hours it was accessible within the app.
The experience taught us a couple of things: First, Snapchat is a great storytelling platform for something like this. It presents everything in chronological order and it’s easy to add more context with captions and drawings. It’s also not that intrusive to the people you’re photographing or recording (videos have a maximum length of 10 seconds). And it’s okay if it doesn’t look totally polished – that’s part of the charm.
The reaction from our followers was great from the beginning and they sent us a lot of enthusiastic snaps (see below). They said they loved the behind-the-scenes access and were impressed to see how many hands it takes to get something on the air and online (we talked to nine people while documenting Dan’s story).
We also tried a simultaneous experiment to drive more people to our Snapchat account. We’ve been on the app for over a year and have slowly built up a following. Social editor Lori Todd had the idea to try pushing our reach a step further by temporarily changing the @NPR Twitter avatar to our unique Snapchat profile picture (it operates like a QR code – you can take a photo of it in the app and follow us automatically).
It worked remarkably well (some on Twitter accused us of selling our soul to Snapchat, but most didn’t seem to mind the gimmick). We added hundreds of new followers over the course of the day.
In the past week, we’ve noticed other publishers trying out the avatar trick, no doubt because it works so well. Here’s a tweet we saw earlier today:
- Serri
Notes
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Recently NPR took to Snapchat to show the process of how they create “All Things Considered.”
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A behind-the-scenes look at the behind-the-scenes look NPR gave Snapchat followers around one of their stories. Whoa.
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