Snapchat is partnering with college newspapers to make campus editions for its Discover section
Snapchat is going back to college.
The company has asked college newspapers to produce local campus editions for its Discover section this fall semester, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Snap has reached out to at least a dozen of the best colleges in the country for the initiative, including Yale, Syracuse, and Dartmouth, per sources.
Snapchat parent Snap Inc. confirmed the initiative when contacted by Business Insider on Tuesday and said that it had quietly tested campus Discover sections with newspapers from UCLA, Dartmouth, Stanford, and the University of Washington last semester.
This is the first time that Snapchat has opened Discover up to less established media companies. Discover currently features daily articles and videos tailored for Snapchat's vertical video format from the likes of The Daily Mail, BuzzFeed, Vice, and The New York Times.
It's also the first time that Snapchat has decided to show hyper-localized versions of Discover to its users. Some larger Discover partners are currently shown in certain countries and not others, but these upcoming campus editions will only be visible to users on each respective college campus.
Snap will monetize its college Discover editions by sharing ad revenue with the school or the student publication. The company paid $58 million to existing Discover partners last year and shares ad revenue with most of them as well.
This won't be the first time that Snap has used its young user base to create content. The app started letting students submit videos and photos to create crowdsourced "Our Stories" about campus life in 2014.