When the opportunity to do a Discover channel on Snapchat presented itself, we were, naturally, excited. The Snapchat platform clearly offered an unparalleled opportunity to reach a giant population of digital natives.
And, to be honest, some of us were also skeptical: Could we deliver a strong editorial package on a platform we primarily knew as a way to send quick visual notes to friends?
But as we set out to recruit a team, and as we started reading résumés and conducting interviews, we got really excited. There were people out there who had a great understanding of the Vox brand and a great vision for what that brand ought to mean on Discover.
Fundamentally, it means storytelling that is optimized for the format. It's vertical. It's visual. It's swipeable. It's very new.
But it's also old. On Discover we publish one "edition" per day, a rhythm that would be familiar to a newspaper veteran but takes some getting used to if you've spent your whole career on the web. That means becoming thoughtful about a whole new set of design and editorial questions. How does one story flow into another? What goes first, and what goes last? And in a universe where you're not able to go for quantity over quality, how do you really polish your work and make it shine for modern audiences using modern devices?
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We've come up with something that we are incredibly proud of: a truly mobile-first multimedia experience with great performance and beautiful graphics.
You'll find our editions every day at 6 am, frequently — though not always — with the entire edition focused on a single topic or theme.
You'll find a lot of great Vox stories and videos on our channel, but this isn't just a place where we'll be pushing content from our website. It's a unique experience, uniquely suited to contemporary habits, that just happens to be fueled by the same values — an emphasis on explanation, a preference for the important over the new, and a determination to speak to people in a way that is both clear and serious — that power our website, our YouTube page, our Facebook and Twitter offerings, our newsletter, and everything else we do.
We expect that a large share of the audience we find on Discover will be people who aren't necessarily familiar with us from our website, and that's great. We're excited to introduce Vox to the growing and curious audience on Snapchat.
Check it out.
Download Snapchat for iPhone from the Apple store.
Download Snapchat for Android from the Google Play store.
