Snapchat ends its Local Stories section as it shifts to live events, fires about 15 curators
Snapchat Inc. is ending its daily local stories for cities feature, which pulled together video of everyday activities — concerts, cute puppies in the park — shot by users in locales such as New York.
Context & Ripple Effects
Local Stories was the last standing piece of the city-by-city curation experiment Snapchat built out across 2015: curated New Year's Eve "Our Story" posts on Times Square screens, then Story Explorer's multi-perspective view of Live Stories in New York and Los Angeles. Ending the daily local feed continues a retreat that began when Snapchat killed original content for Snap Channel and cut or reassigned its own 15-person team in favor of Discover partners.
The replacement pattern is already visible in the surrounding coverage: discovery moves from salaried curators to product and partnerships — search over public Stories rolled out in select US cities, where posts stay visible for months instead of one day — and eventually to [[a:933369|20 outside news partners including CNN and NBC aggregating user clips into Curated Our Stories]].
First-order effects
- About 15 curators are laid off immediately, and residents of covered locales such as New York lose the single daily feed of local user video.
Second-order effects
- Human curation gets replaced twice over: Snapchat's own public-Stories search handles what editors used to pick, while live-event coverage concentrates curation spend on marquee moments rather than everyday city life.
Third-order effects
- Following the Snap Channel shutdown, this confirms a structural stance at Snapchat: no in-house editorial layer — aggregation is either automated or outsourced to media partners, a model the Curated Our Stories news-partner lineup later formalizes.
The trend: Snapchat is systematically dismantling staffed content curation — first Snap Channel, now Local Stories — in favor of automated search and partner-run aggregation.