There’s a startup called NowThisNews that delivers the news du jour in short videos embedded on their site and mobile apps. But these days, apparently that’s not enough. So the Awl has noticed, now in addition, NowThisNews is sending out news bulletins via Snapchat. Abandon all hope.
Their news reels (if you can call them that), come in a 90-second snap, divided into segments with short Snapchat-sized bytes. They feel kind of gross, or at the very least approach the news with a strange detachment, going from headlines in Ferguson, Missouri, to cute baby shaped pears. For reference, see Monday’s feed is pictured in this post. Can you imagine receiving a Snapchat of I dunno, a rainbow, and then getting the increasingly terrible news from Ferguson in terrible multicolored chicken scratch? If CNN makes the news sound bad this somehow makes it worse — or at the very least it trivialises it. And to think, someone thought this was a good idea. [The Awl]
