NEW YORK: The symbiotic relationship between social media and news publishers has taken another turn as Snapchat partners with four news discovery platforms to give journalists access to pictures and video at times of breaking news.

NewsWhip, Storyful, SAM Desk and TagBoard will be able to use tools to find and distribute publicly shared content to those news organizations using their platforms, Adweek reported.

Of particular interest is the data from Snap Map which enables national journalists to pinpoint certain locations where a story is breaking, or local journalists to keep tabs on what might be happening in their locality.

“The geography data from Snapchat is really trustworthy compared to other platforms, and it can be very targeted, which makes the content complement text-based journalism on Twitter really well,” explained James Neufeld, CEO and Founder of SAM Desk.

“Using our AI, journalists can combine the two sets of data to find facts and break news that much faster,” he told Axios Media Trends.

For Snapchat, the partnerships are an important step in its push to expose its content to non-users and encourage more of them to join; at the same time it will hope that existing users engage further with the publicly available content featured in its Discover Stories and Snap Maps products.

“Even though this is a tool for journalists, I do think publishers and media organizations will find this useful, because it gives them access to footage during breaking news situations that is otherwise very expensive to obtain on their own,” explained Rahul Chopra, Head of ‘Stories Everywhere’ at Snapchat.

Elsewhere, Snapchat has deepened its partnership with Nielsen and now offers marketers the ability to make targeted ad buys based on offline data, Ad Age reported.

Sourced from Axios Media Trends, Adweek, Ad Age; additional content by WARC staff