SA’s EWN starts pushing out news via WhatsApp

Are chat apps the future of news? There are more than a few very influential people who think they are. Publishers are coming onboard too and it’s not just agile, tech-savvy media startups who are doing so.

Earlier this week, for instance, a fair amount of fuss was made about the fact that The New York Times started publishing stories to WhatsApp. As it turned out though, it had actually been beaten to the mark by Primedia-owned news house Eye Witness News (EWN).

The company uses the broadcast list functionality on WhatsApp to send out a morning brief at 08h30 and a round-up of the day’s stories after 17h00 — as well as any breaking news — to a database of subscribers.

Read more: You can now read The New York Times articles on WhatsApp

As well as the standard weather forecast but at present, EWN has added a power forecast, to help users to plan around load-shedding.

The broadcast list allows subscribers to engage with EWN, but does not reveal the identity of any other members of the list. According to the news organisation, the channel had attracted 4 000 subscribers within a month of launching.

EWN also says that the bulletins have seen more than 20 000 click-throughs to the EWN mobi site and over 2 100 click-throughs to the desktop site.

According to EWN, the Whatsapp updates are “short and punchy, speaking to the user in the lingo of Whatsapp — spiked with emoticons and cheeky commentary to introduce each link, which takes the user to the full story on the mobi site”.