whatsapp
Credit: By Sam Azgor on Flickr. Some rights reserved

This week Facebook announced it is considering allowing businesses to contact users through WhatsApp in the future, which could provide a new opportunity for publishers to interact with their audience.

In the meantime, news organisations have been experimenting with WhatsApp as a reporting tool – the BBC used it to deliver information to people in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak last October, gathering 22,000 subscribers, and community rights organisation On Our Radar trained citizen journalists to send audio reports via the platform.

In this blog post, Paul Bradshaw shares a few lessons learned by a group of his students, who recently used WhatsApp to report on the UK elections. He advises on the benefits of using the app's 'Broadcast message' feature and considering a more visual approach when targeting a younger audience.
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