Content Is Back

Content may no longer be king, but lack of content can kill. Apple, Google, Facebook and now Twitter are assembling teams of journalists and/or forging alliances with major news organizations in an attempt to keep eyeballs lasered in on their sites. The thought is that the longer consumer attention stays focused on their material, the more likely it is they will see an ad and maybe even buy something.

It's plausible, in a '3-billion-Chinese-have-to-buy-something-somewhere-sometime' sort of way. Didn't work too well during the dotcom boom, but heck, that was almost a generation ago. Everything's different now. Isn't it? JL

Hannah Kuchler reports in the Financial Times:

Assembling journalists to curate content could help Twitter reach beyond its 302 million active monthly users to those who peruse the site but never log in and even people who see tweets on other sites.
Twitter is assembling a group of journalists to curate content on the messaging platform, the latest technology company to push further into the media business. The San Francisco-based company, which is in the middle of a search for a new chief executive, has announced Project Lightning, a feature designed to make it easy for newbies to get to grips with the cascade of tweets on the site.Kevin Weil, Twitter’s senior vice-president of product, said this was a “bold change, not evolutionary”. He said it could help Twitter reach beyond its 302m monthly active users to those who peruse the site but never log in and even people who see tweets on other sites.
“There’s a beautiful connection to our strategy of reaching users on every platform,” he told BuzzFeed. “It’s not just logged-in Twitter, it’s logged-out, and it’s syndicated on other websites and mobile apps.”
The project is part of a broader effort to boost Twitter’s flagging user growth, enticing people put off by the confusion and fast-paced nature of the platform.
Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, announced last week that he was stepping down at the end of the month. Mr Costolo, who will be replaced in the interim by Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey, had been under pressure as user growth had slowed and the company missed revenue expectations in the last quarter.

Twitter’s plan to hire a new media team around the world follows in the footsteps of Apple, which is hiring a team of journalists to run its new Apple News service.

A job ad posted for Apple News last week said Apple was seeking candidates with more than five years of “newsroom experience” to compile the best in breaking news from publishers including the Financial Times, New York Times and The Guardian.

Google and Facebook are also working on partnerships with publishers. Facebook has agreements with nine publishers including the BBC and BuzzFeed to show “instant articles” in users’ news feeds, without them clicking through to the publishers’ website.

Twitter and Apple are not the first US technology companies to recruit journalists, with Facebook, LinkedIn and Snapchat all hiring reporters and editors in the past few years.

Katie Jacobs-Stanton, vice-president of global media at Twitter, said it was developing an editorial policy to guide its judgments on what it included in Project Lightning.