Snapchat is going to launch a news division and it has roped in CNN’s political correspondent Peter Hamby to join it as the Head of News. However, Hamby will still be contributing to CNN until 2016, his job at Snapchat would be to share his virtues on political and digital news, in order to help the social media network in getting the beat right.
Hamby has served as the national political reporter at CNN for the past eight years, but it was the coverage of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections that got him into the limelight.
Snapchat has also moved towards the news in the past few months. The company launched a new feature in January 2015, known as ’Discover’, which enabled media houses like CNN to share the top stories of the day. It seems that Hamby will be helping out the company in moving successfully into the news industry, it would help Snapchat to create its own news stories rather than publishing news from surrogate sources.
In an interview, Hamby said,”Snapchat is one of the most exciting young companies in the world. They have a big and growing audience, and we’ve seen Discover is a huge success. Their live stories around big events, around places both here and abroad, the potential to take users to new places — we can see some application of that with news,” he said.
Snapchat has not uttered a word about the upcoming feature, but the company recently launched ’Discover’ and we assume that ‘News’ too shall help the company in engaging the users further. These new features will definitely overhaul the image of Snapchat, which was earlier deemed as an image sharing app only.