What a small daily newspaper’s digital strategy aimed at millennials might look like.

Sources say The Californian intends to focus its digital strategy with millennials with a handful of apps, and that its staffers will be trained to use them in the coming weeks. Here are the apps we’re told are in play. Note that while some of them – like Twitter and Facebook – are already widely in use at The Californian and many other papers (including the Weekly), others represent the proverbial brave new world for online news gathering and delivery.

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Twitter is the short-messaging social network that allows anyone to broadcast their thoughts, post pictures and videos and send and receive private messages. And it was used widely during the Egyptian Revolution and Arab Spring. At the think-tank Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, Director Joshua Benton writes, “We live in a time when there are honest questions whether companies like Twitter… have a big enough share of our attention to have legitimate advertising businesses.” Users who love Twitter really love it; it’s doubtful there are enough of them in Salinas to consume news from The Californian through it, nor enough to generate any advertising dollars. twitter.com

Periscope is a Twitter app that allows you to live-stream video from your phone, share the feed with your “viewers” and allow them to comment in real time. What’s great about it is that it’s live and immediate. What’s bad about it is that it’s live and immediate. Only so-called power feeds – feeds that have a ton of subscribers – are moderated to make sure violent or sexually explicit content doesn’t get through. Other feeds that only have a few users aren’t well-policed. It’s not clear if The Californian expects its journalists to use it in the field, meaning they’ll be mucking around with a phone recording video instead of reporting stories, or if it intends to use reader-provided content to bolster its video offerings on the website. It could be great at a soccer game, for example, in soccer-crazed Salinas. It could be horrible and intrusive if The Californian solicits readers to film crime scenes. www.periscope.tv.

Snapchat is an app that allows users to take pictures or record short videos, caption them and share with friends. The recipient has 20 seconds to read the message once it’s opened and then it ostensibly disappears into the ether. Snapchat introduced a feature called “Discover,” described as “a fun new way to explore stories from different editorial perspectives.” Discover has 15 channels (one for each publisher it has deals with; Gannett is currently not among them, although CNN, National Geographic, BuzzFeed and Vice are) and each channel contributes 5-10 stories a day. I asked a millennial about reading news via Snapchat and got a combined eye roll and shrug: “What it’s good for is marketing,” this millennial told me. “You might swipe left on a story on Vice and come to an ad for Reading and Leeds Festival. By the next day, those fests will have sold another 2,500 tickets because it was on Snapchat.” Snapchat.com.

Giphy launched in 2013 as a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) search engine. In short, it allowed users to search out all of those animated cat and dog pictures people love so much. But in August, Giphy released an app called the Giphy Cam, in which users can record an image in a five-second burst, enhance it with photo filters, overlays and effects, then text or share it to a variety of social media. It’s absolutely unclear how Giphy can be of value to a newsgathering organization, unless The Californian plans on using it as a way to get users to share the animated images on its social media pages. Responds the millennial who spoke about Snapchat: “It seems like they’re trying to capitalize on what’s popular and not considering what could be of real use.” Giphy.com