After being part of Barack Obama’s social media-savvy White House team and State department, it was perhaps a logical career step for Katie Jacobs Stanton to move to Twitter.
Now, four years after joining the company, Stanton has been promoted to Twitter’s vice president of global media. Her new role involves working with media companies to help them get the most out of Twitter as a distribution platform for their content. She is at the forefront of Twitter’s efforts to increase the revenue generated from distributing content, via advertising and other means, following its successful stock market flotation in November.
While she settles into her new job, the debate rumbles on about whether Twitter – which defines itself as a technology company – is effectively in the media business these days, following its decision last month to suspend accounts distributing images of US journalist James Foley’s beheading.
“Twitter was something that I couldn’t live without,” Stanton says, looking back on her decision to leave the State department in 2010. She is back in her San Francisco home after a year in Paris as Twitter’s vice president of international market development.
“I had seen first-hand the impact that Twitter had with a lot of initiatives while I was at the White House and the State department. I knew this was changing the way that we would consume information, that we could never go back.”
Her role can involve anything from offering education on Twitter analytics to premiering content, as with Twitter’s recent Michael Jackson music video launch.
“The label and the [Michael Jackson] estate knew that Twitter is a place for breaking information,” Stanton says. “It is the best way to distribute information that is going to reach the world’s largest audience, not just on the Twitter platform [because] this content gets embedded, it perpetuates into the fabric of news.” For Twitter, the Jackson video meant that users spent longer on the platform — useful for a company that is looking to sell more ads and eventually turn a consistent profit. […]
“We don’t create our content, we aren’t a publisher per se,” she points out. “But we give our users and our partners around the world the opportunity to create content, to consume content and to connect with others about the content they feel so passionately about.”
Would Twitter ever create its own content? “That is not our thing,” Stanton says. How about charging media companies to distribute their content? “I don’t think so,” she replies, firmly. “It is not really part of what we do. We are a free service and a free platform.”
For broadcasters Twitter has arguably already proved its worth in this way, with viewers taking to the platform to discuss live programming, but Stanton believes newspaper and magazine publishers can also benefit.
“Twitter makes it easier to consume a lot of small bursts of content in a simple fashion,” she explains. “A lot of our users will get a snapshot of what is going on in the world, then they can go back to the various newspapers or magazines, to be able to consume that content.”
The message to media companies is clear: Twitter is not a rival creator; it is a platform for distributing and promoting your content. […]
Not that many of today’s reporters will need to take lessons in Twitter use. As exasperated editors the world over already know, journalists have eagerly taken to the platform. “Journalists are like our PhD students,” Stanton says. “They have been active and early on Twitter since the very beginning and they intuitively understand the value and the reach of Twitter.”
Twitter, in turn, can help journalists to produce better work, she believes. “Twitter is this operating system of news,” she says. “How can we help journalists to move faster and reach more witnesses and reach more users and to get the pulse of the planet, writing about things they know people care about?”
SOURCE: The Guardian
