NewsTrack: Huffington Post goes mobile

Huffington Post has a snapchat that they update regularly. I started following it on Snapchat after last week’s class discussion. They update the snap story multiple times a day resulting in a few minute story by the end of the day.

Last weekend, the Huffington Post covered the SXSW (South by Southwest) Festival in Texas. SXSW is a music, film and art festival in Austin, Texas. Huffington Post was there covering the event and posted many snaps of musicians performing, festival goers dancing, festival food and many other things. The festival lasted all weekend, so by the end of the weekend the snapchat story was many minutes long – which is impressive because at most the longest clip was 10 seconds long.

Since the SXSW festival ended, Huffington Post has continued to post to its snapchat story, however these videos have been less interesting and sort of a strange aspect of the Huffington Post. The videos are just random reporters talking to the camera about pretty random things. The snapchat videos don’t relate to other content published on their website. These videos would make more sense, and be more cohesive with the Huffington Post, if the reporters in the videos were promoting their piece that is already published online.

Snapchat is a powerful and new tool that is open to reporters, however I believe that the Huffington Post missed the mark on this one. It is a rather random selection of videos on the website. It would be better if the videos that they show on Snapchat relates back to content that is already on their website. The original reporting on the Snapchat video doesn’t make much sense in terms of the Huffington Post. The social media editors for the Huffington Post should take a serious look at how Snapchat is working for their site.

Assignment: A Night at the FreeP

For this video assignment I made a video about BU’s independent student newspaper, The Daily Free Press. We publish content five days a week online and one day a week in print. We write about everything from city and campus news to the latest goings on on the BU sports fields, concert reviews and more.

You can find us online at: dailyfreepress.com or pick up our print edition around campus every Thursday.

 

NewsTrack: Spotlight and the Oscars

While the Huffington Post had lots of articles about the Oscars, they didn’t mention Spotlight specifically except to say that it won Best Picture. Their Oscar coverage focused on the controversies – outside of the winners and losers of the awards. They focused on Chris Rock’s opening monologue and Tina Fey’s comments about all the “Bulls**T” she saw while at the Oscars which she talked about on the Howard Stern show Monday morning.

For a movie about journalism – and arguably the best journalism movie since “All the President’s Men” – the HuffPo was lacking in coverage. They are much more inclined to talk about the drama – justified or not – than talk about the actual award show itself.

The HuffPo has more fluff articles than anything else. They write about how much Lady Gaga’s earrings cost, about cookies that are replicas of great Oscar dresses and how Stallone’s brother thought he should’ve won for Creed. Another thing that the HuffPo talked about a lot was Leo DiCaprio and his Oscar and lack of previous Oscar wins.