NBC News Doubles Down on Snapchat with New Show

The NBC News team is taking its first daily video program to a younger, digital audience on Snapchat. Hosted by Savannah Sellers and Gadi Schwartz, the program “Stay Tuned” will bring the latest headlines of “NBC Nightly News” in two-to-three-minute segments that will run twice each weekday and twice over the weekend.

This is the first time the NBC Nightly News team will offer special editions of its programming as it seeks to attract youth on a nontraditional medium.

Senior vice president of digital at NBC News Nich Ascheim calls the program “crucial.”

“There is a generation of people who are going to be cord-nevers, cord-cutters. We need to know how to reach them,” said Ascheim.

This spring, when Snap, Inc. went public, NBCUniversal invested $500 million on the new platform.

NBC News will migrate a team of 30 employees to the “Stay Tuned” program, and according to sources has committed to update their Snapchat program every time big news breaks. “Stay Tuned” is slated to run at 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. each weekday, as well as at 1 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, running four to five stories per show.

Aschiem also added, “We have said from day one we want this to be a news broadcast that is worthy of the NBC News legacy, and so we are not going to dumb it down in any way,”

NBC will be making a return on its investment through advertising. According to Variety.com, STX Entertainment will be the show’s official launch partner, and will use “Stay Tuned” to help promote the new movie “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.”

What do you think about NBC’s move to the new platform?