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I write about the business of media and technology for Forbes and Ad Age. Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/kantrowitz.

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Ex-Tumblr Media Evangelist On What To Expect From Twitter's Head of News

Twitter’s decision to hire a “Head of News and Journalism” seems odd to say the least. The company, expected to announce the hire in the coming days, already has a healthy user base of reporters. So many, in fact, that The New York Times’ Brian Stelter once called the platform a  ”chatroom for journalists.” So it’s difficult see the logic in hiring someone to recruit more.

Ex-Tumblr Media Evangelist Mark Coatney

Ex-Tumblr Media Evangelist Mark Coatney

Mark Coatney, once the media evangelist at Tumblr and now SVP of digital at Al Jazeera America, is someone who should know what Twitter’s up to. While at Tumblr, Coatney played a similar role, recruiting news organizations to the platform was one of his main responsibilities.

Earlier this week, we caught up with Coatney and asked him to share his perspective. It’s a smart move on Twitter’s part, he tells us:

With so many journalists on board already, isn’t it odd for Twitter to hire a Head of News?

No. Twitter wants to be the place where the interaction between audience and provider happens first. So, it’s not a bad strategy to go to people used to building mass audiences, the people who worked in mass media, and use them to help build partnerships and develop better strategies for bringing Twitter to people who are not professional users.

But journalists are notorious for talking inside baseball on Twitter, so how is bringing another into the fray going to make the platform more accessible?

I’m not hiring for the role, but I think they want to bring someone fairly high up in journalism whose got a lot of connections who will help on a very high level with partnerships with news organizations. I think what they’re looking for is someone who will go to CBS CBS News and make sure that Twitter is an integral component of what they do.

Who do you think is getting the better deal out of the relationship between news organizations and social platforms?

That’s a key question. It all really depends on how well you’re using the platform and how much resources you’re putting into it. If you have good smart people who know how to use Twitter and build audience with it, then there’s no question the news organizations are getting a good deal because it provides distribution and access for free. If you’re just using Twitter as an RSS feed, you’re not spending a lot of money on that, but you’re also getting very little value out of that… For a news organization, there’s also a strong value in having your audience like you. These networks allow at least the opportunity for you, in a really cheap way, to really talk to your audience and get them engaged with you in a way that does have value.

You made the jump from the news business to a social media platform. What would motivate someone in the news business to take this job?

Everyone is trying to figure out what news organizations will look like in the 21st century. We still haven’t figured out the best way to do news on the web. TV figured out how to do news on TV. Radio figured out how to do news on the radio. But the web is still trying to figure how to do it in a way that takes advantage of the unique things you can do on the web. A lot of those are very interactive things, which Twitter is really good at. For anyone who takes this job, the cool thing is you could be the center of creating the thing that 20 years from now everyone will think is obvious.

Judging from your experience, what will the transition be like?

The only thing that will be difficult is typically, if you’re coming from journalism, you’re going from an organization in which the journalists are the center to a place like Twitter where that’s a very important function, but not the only function. Technology is obviously the core of that company.

You’re back in news now, but would you ever think about returning to a tech company down the road?

Sure, I loved Tumblr. I thought it was a great experience and I would definitely do something like that in a heartbeat. It was really fun. Al Jazeera was a unique opportunity that came along and probably would never come along again. So that’s why I thought I should do it. For a lot of reasons, it’s useful for a journalist to do something outside of journalism, to do something to stretch their mind a little bit. I’m sure it made me a better journalist.

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