Twitter amps up its status as a news agent with new job posting

Twitter breaks news and readers flock to the social network for the latest in world events, so it stands to reason that the company will capitalise on that. It’s looking for a head of news and journalism.

According to the job posting, the company “is playing an integral role in the evolution of the news industry — both as a tool for reporters and newsrooms and as a way for consumers to find news in real-time. Twitter has already changed the way news breaks and provided journalists new ways to connect with their readers”.

Due to the role the microblogging platform feels it has played in journalism thus far, it wants to make itself even more useful to media organisations across the globe. So the lucky candidate for this job will be “responsible for devising and executing the strategies that make Twitter indispensable to newsrooms and journalists, as well as an essential part of the operations and strategy of news organizations and TV news networks.”

It seems for the company this is an opportunity to get journalists to use the platform more through engagement and participation as well getting news sites and networks to use Twitter products more.

According to PCMag, Twitter is not the first company to hire journalist to curate “branded content”. Tumblr launched a similar effort last year to tell Tumblr stories and Facebook hired a managing editor to do something along the same lines. Twitter could succeed in doing this: it is already part of the journalistic scope as journalists do look it for breaking news and story sources.

Twitter is looking for someone to:

Develop a multiyear year strategy for news that drives substantial increases in:
• Volume and quality of professional news content on Twitter, especially in breaking news
• Number of journalists using Twitter, both as a tool to aid their reporting and also as a tool to distribute their content
• Volume and quality in usage of Twitter as a source in news stories (online and in print)
• How widely and effectively Twitter products are used by news organizations—from embedded timelines and Tweets on news sites to adoption of on-Twitter products like Twitter Cards
• Volume and quality of on-air integrations across TV news networks
• Frequency and engagement level of user behavior around news content on Twitter
• Drive breadth and quality of all on-air integrations across a broad roster of news programming, from breaking news to evening newscasts, news magazines, morning news shows, etc.

  Partnership management:

• Be integrated at the highest executive and editorial levels of the news industry, being an influential part of your partners’ strategic planning efforts (e.g. news gathering, user experience, digital)
• Increase the volume, diversity and uniqueness of the news content on Twitter from journalists and a broad range of news partners