Blog Post #5

Kimberly Pena
Journalism 360-01
Professor Yavner
December 5, 2017

    Social media is constantly evolving and with that comes new forms for journalists to implement social media into their everyday work life. Snapchat is that new beginning. With Snapchat you can do brief videos reporting live on whatever event you are covering. You can ask players questions and have them answer in short snippet videos lasting from 10 seconds all the way to one minute. Not only that, fans can send in their questions and that way you are feeding the audience what they want and interacting with them at the same time. The main goal of social media is to interact with your audience and Snapchat really gives you the opportunity to do. You can create stories on the app and just report live and demonstrate highlights on your stories. It is fun, quick and its all in the palm of the hands of your audience.
    Despite all the fun things you can do with Snapchat and the interactivity it creates, there does still exist some disadvantages. In the excerpt it states,”Still, Snapchat represents a major shift from virtually all other applications because of one crucial aspect: Images and videos shared are only temporary, ranging from 1 s to a maximum of 24 hr. Some view the temporary nature of Snapchat as a major disadvantage for sports fan engagement as well as marketing and sponsorship aspects; as Burns (2014) argues, ‘Why would I give valuable content to an app where content disappears as opposed to Facebook or Instagram where it lasts forever?’’’ Yes, the videos do disappear from your story and technically you really can’t share the story unless you screen record the whole thing. However, you can still save the story on your phone and share it on Facebook or Twitter and that way you can use all your social media accounts from just one app. Snapchat will allow you to save your story so you can have one long video of everything you shared, and it can make it for an interesting video on social media.
    Although I think Snapchat does introduce a new spin in how sports journalist report when using social media, I still believe Twitter and Facebook are still the most effective ways of reporting when using social media. On both of those accounts, it is easy to share your tweets/posts and can really reach a wider audience. For Snapchat to work the person must be following you so they can view the content you put out there, meanwhile Facebook and Twitter basically everyone can see it.
    Snapchat is still relatively a new app so there can be changes made to make it more interactive and public for journalists. Snapchat is also off to a good start and it sure is a fun app that journalists can get involved with when reporting live during sporting events.