Snapchat enlists 20 news partners including CNN and NBC to create Curated Our Stories, or curated stories with user-generated content in the Discover section
Sara Fischer / Axios :
Context & Ripple Effects
Snapchat's Discover section has been an ad-supported, professionally staffed surface since its 2015 launch, and after the fake-news wave the company doubled down on human judgment — vetting publishers and hiring editors for its story products. In July it began building the plumbing, partnering with four news discovery platforms so journalists could mine the billions of public photos and videos shared on the app.
Curated Our Stories is that pipeline reaching scale: twenty newsrooms including CNN, Cosmopolitan, and NBC now curate user-generated content directly inside Discover, turning Snapchat's raw UGC firehose into editor-selected packages.
First-order effects
- CNN, NBC, Cosmopolitan, and the other eighteen partners gain a new distribution surface on Snapchat where their editorial judgment, not an algorithm, selects which user videos and photos reach the audience.
- Snapchat offloads the curation burden for its massive public-content volume onto professional newsrooms while keeping the ad-supported Discover economics it built in 2015.
Second-order effects
- Publishers that joined get a differentiated product — vetted, human-curated UGC — that pressures rival platforms to offer newsrooms similar sanctioned roles in their own content pipelines rather than scraping or algorithmic placement alone.
- The July discovery-tooling partnerships become the supply chain for this program, giving those vendors a paying customer base among the twenty partner newsrooms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, UGC distribution splits into two tiers — algorithmic feeds versus publisher-curated packages — with the 2016 vetting-and-human-editors posture becoming the template platforms use to claim trustworthiness without abandoning user-generated scale.
The trend: Platforms are re-embedding professional newsrooms into user-generated content pipelines as a trust and curation layer, converting raw UGC volume into editor-vetted, ad-supported packages.