Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

CNN has partnered with Snapchat Discover for a daily news program called The Update.

The show launches today on Snapchat, and provides a rundown of the top stories from the day featuring videos from CNN reporters and bureaus around the world.

The Update is scheduled to begin streaming on Snapchat Discover each day at 6 p.m. ET and will also produce breaking news segments.

Adweek’s Jason Lynch writes that each episode will feature five or more stories, all in Snap’s vertical video format—as well as breaking news segments....

With little breaking news to propel the network's ratings, CNN last week had the fewest viewers in prime time in 20 years. The average was 395,000.

This May has seemed to present special issues for CNN. One day last week, the network’s 9 p.m. program, hosted by Piers Morgan, hit what was very likely an all-time CNN low of just 39,000 viewers in the audience group sought by news advertisers, those ages 25 to 54. His ratings did bounce back two nights later to 175,000, a point he had some fun with in a post to Twitter: “My #CNN ratings rose 350% last night on Tuesday’s number. #HalfwitToGeniusIn48hrs)”

Not only has there been the usual array of strong May programming on other networks (the broadcasters save their season and series finales for this month) but there has also been little of the breaking news that has traditionally helped push CNN’s numbers (a year ago, the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden made news in May)....

[Biggest issue? Relevance to young viewers - JD]