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Most local TV stations use them — Facebook, Twitter, even Instagram. It’s 2021, after all. But as Sarandon Raboin scrolled through her phone, checking her social media accounts, she wondered: Why aren’t newsrooms on Twitch?
Sure, the livestreaming platform, founded in 2011, is mostly known for its popularity among video gamers and the fans who watch them play. But it’s also expected to surpass more than 40 million monthly viewers by the end of this year, with more and more Twitch streamers offering up other types of interactive video.
“I’m on TikTok a lot, and I saw this trend of a lot of creators being like, ‘Hey, I’ll be streaming on Twitch,’” says Raboin, a senior here at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and a producer with Cronkite News, the student-run news division of Arizona PBS. “I started to see more YouTube creatives or just people who aren’t necessarily gamers move to the platform. And I thought to myself: In the news, we’re all trying to get in contact with our audience. We want to know what our audience wants, we want to be able to have that real-time communication — so it would be really interesting and cool to use Twitch in the newsroom.”
She pitched the idea to her editors and they were onboard — even though many of them weren’t familiar with the service. One who was: Isaac Easley, an instructor in video journalism and innovation at Cronkite News, a 2012 alum of