In an interesting turn of events, the up and coming king of photo and video messaging will launch a digital magazine on June 27th.
Snapchat recently announced that its online magazine, called Real Life, will publish one essay or narrative per day on living with technology. While the magazine will be owned and funded by Snapchat, Editor-in-Chief Nathan Jurgenson insists in a blog post that Real Life will maintain independence from the social media company.
The magazine has recruited several writers to lead the operation including Rob Horning, Alexandra Molotkow, Sarah Nicole Prickett and Soraya King (Molotkow and Nicole Prickett are both Canadian).
In the magazine’s first post, Jurgenson claims that since social media is more like life than traditional media, it only makes sense for the media that covers technology to be just as “nuanced.” Jurgenson is a sociologist by trade that has made his living as a social media critic, funded by Snapchat for the past three years.
He goes on to write that Snapchat previously paid for the venue for a conference he co-founded called Theorizing the Web, for which the company demanded no editorial control. Real Life will depict a wider range of tech writing, he says, that will open up the genre to new possibilities.
“This work is crucial, but writing about technology is too often relegated to the business section. On this site, it will be the main event. We’re not a news or reviews site, but we will describe the tech world—specifically how that industry shapes the world we live in today. To that end, we aim to address the political uses of technology, including some of the worst practices both inside and outside the tech industry itself,” said Jurgenson in the introductory post for Real Life.
The publication will not be housed in the app, but on the web, which it can be argued is Snapchat’s way of migrating onto the web without drastically altering or changing their platform.
It’s a bold move, but it will be interesting to see whether Real Life inspires other social media platforms to launch similar ventures, seeing as social media has become a haven for all forms of publishing.
Related reading: Snapchat opens Toronto office
[source]Real Life[/source]
