5 Years In, NBC News Plots ‘Stay Tuned’ Expansion

On July 19, 2017, NBC News rolled the dice on Snapchat.

Just a few months earlier, parent company NBCUniversal had invested $500 million in the tech company in conjunction with its IPO, and in turn its various divisions were figuring out how they could build a presence on the Gen Z-skewing platform.

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“I still have a vivid memory of traveling to the Snap offices in Venice Beach and sitting with their team there, as they were thinking of getting into the original content business,” NBC News president Noah Oppenheim recalls in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We at NBC News were realizing that Snap was a platform that was reaching millions of young people, and we were thinking, how could we take our trusted news brand and expose it to that emerging audience?”

The end result of those conversations was Stay Tuned, a daily news show that would live on Snapchat’s Discover page and serve as a sort of Nightly News for Gen Z. NBC tapped Savannah Sellers and Gadi Schwartz to host the show.

“I had been working on digital projects [for NBC News], but my job on paper was an executive assistant,” Sellers recalls.

She was, however, a native to the platform, and comfortable with its quirks and formats. But that led to challenges of its own, namely: Could Snapchat’s user base support a video news show?

“Working for a TV news organization, your brains are wired for your competition being another network, not your competition being whatever else happens to be on Snapchat’s Discover page,” Sellers says, adding that the challenge for the Stay Tuned launch team was “figuring out how we do the news, and have the core of NBC News’ reporting and fact-finding behind it, but also putting [it] in a place to be competitive.”

And it seems to have worked. Stay Tuned now averages one million views per episode on Snapchat and has passed one million followers on TikTok (it had more than 7.5 million views on TikTok in June, and is already on track to pass that in July).

“It’s evolved into something much bigger, it has become our primary Gen Z facing brand,” Oppenheim says.

But it has also been a learning experience for NBC, because just taking a segment from the Today show or Dateline and posting it on Snapchat or TikTok won’t cut it.

“A lot of social video is a lot more casual, informal, sometimes in the case of TikTok, raw,” says NBC News senior vp digital Catherine Kim. “We want to respect and observe those kinds of styles and formats, and tell and share the news with the Gen Z audience in a way in which they are open to hearing it.”

It’s a significant challenge, particularly considering the news consumption habits of younger consumers. According to Pew Research, 90 percent of news consumers under 30 get news from digital devices, but only 45 percent get news from TV.

“We are aware of the fact that for these consumers, a lot of them have never watched the news before, and for a lot of them this is the only news that they get,” Sellers says. “So we keep that very much in mind and take it as a serious responsibility so that you get what you need to know to be a young, informed person today.”

But younger news consumers don’t just use TikTok and Snapchat. So NBC News is plotting a Stay Tuned expansion.

Later this year, Stay Tuned will reboot its presence on arguably the biggest streaming video platform of all: YouTube. And in September, the company will debut its first longform documentary under the Stay Tuned brand. And, if all goes well, NBC is plotting a Stay Tuned podcast for 2023.

“Ultimately we want to be the go-to Gen Z news brand,” says Kim. “We know they are consuming news content on Snapchat on TikTok, and on YouTube, and we want to be there too.”

Kim says that Stay Tuned previously toyed around with YouTube, but ultimately allowed the channel to go dormant. It will be revived in the fall with a focus on videos in the 5- to 10-minute -ong range, significantly longer than the 3 minutes and under format it uses on Snapchat and TikTok.

In September, Stay Tuned will debut its doc (it’s about the influencer economy and cosmetic procedures) on the NBC News Now streaming service, Peacock and NBCNews.com.

And Kim says the company is in the pilot phase on a podcast, trying to find the right audio format for the news brand.

“We think a lot about being native to the platform, being mindful of how young consumers receive their news, how they like their news shared with them,” Kim says.

“Wherever audiences are looking for news and information, we want them to find NBC News,” Oppenheim adds.

While social platforms may not be as lucrative as traditional linear television (at least not yet), it is growing fast. Peacock and NBC News Now are priorities for NBC, while YouTube has built a reliable economic model for creators on its platform. The IAB and PwC, meanwhile, predict that podcast advertising revenue will top $2 billion in 2022. In other words, what was once an experiment has the potential to be a real business.

Chris Berend, executive vp digital for the NBCU News Group, tells THR that Stay Tuned is profitable.

But for NBC, the goal, ultimately, is not just to build out a profitable Gen Z news brand, but to build credibility with an audience that may otherwise not be exposed to its reporting.

“As long as you are in pursuit of bringing the news to people who need it, wherever they are, that can’t be a bad job,” Sellers says.

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