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Snap opens up crowdsourced ‘Our Story’ content to news organizations like CNN and NBC News

Snap opens up crowdsourced ‘Our Story’ content to news organizations like CNN and NBC News

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Snap is expanding its crowdsourced Our Story content to its various media partners, including CNN, NBC News, and NowThis, who’ll be able to draw on the user-submitted images and videos for their own Snap stories, according to a report from Deadline.

Introduced back in 2015, the Our Story feature on Snapchat collects Snaps that users submit for specific categories, places, events, or topics — think a sports game or a protest rally — into a single, curated Snap story that offers a wider, on-the-ground perspective for a particular event.

Snap is opening that up to its partners

And now, Snap is opening that up to its partners, who’ll be able to create their own Our Story topics, collect Snaps, and add their own titles, graphics, and text. The idea is to give news organizations a new place to curate user-submitted content for ongoing or breaking stories, which seems like a good fit with what people actually use Snapchat for these days.

The finished Our Stories can live outside the app, too, with the option for companies to embed them on websites and other social media sites. More importantly, Snap already has a monetization system in place, which may actually encourage its partners to use the tools.

Snap hasn’t exactly had the best time of late, losing millions of users with its most recent redesign, but it still remains an important part of the social media world. Presumably the company is hoping that working to offer news organizations better tools will help to attract both content and users to the platform.