The Old Gray Lady will try and bring in a younger audience in ways it never has before. On Thursday, The New York Times announced it will launch its first channel on Snapchat’s Discovery tab.
The Times’ Snapchat channel will publish daily weekday content inspired by the paper’s Morning Briefings feature in hopes of attracting the millions of young people who flock to ephemeral video platform.
“We’re seeing enormous interest on the part of younger audiences for the sort of smart, visual digital journalism for which The Times has become known. And Snapchat is an ideal place to reach that audience,” Kinsey Wilson, executive vice president, product, and technology at The New York Times Company said in the press release. No date has been set for the channel’s debut.
The Times is hoping to carry the digital success from the last three months into the new year. The newspaper added 276,000 net digital subscribers in the last three months of 2016. That is more digital subscribers added than at any three-month period since the paper first introduced digital subscriptions in 2011.
The daily briefings offer quick recaps on a variety of news stories across the world. Since debuting on The Times’ now-defunct NYT Now app in 2014, the feature has been integral in the paper’s digital footprint. The paper lauded its briefings as “among the most successful products that The Times has launched in recent years” and as “a digital manifestation of a daily newspaper,” in its recent internal report on the future of journalism.
For Snapchat, its Discovery page now adds one of the most prestigious news publications to its growing number of outlets. That list includes the Washington Journal, ESPN, Vox, Vice, and CNN.
