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.
Concerns about user growth and engagement levels were cited as reasons for Twitter’s share price dipping earlier this year, following its impressive stock market debut 10 months ago. However, it has bounced back following better than expected results for the three months to the end of June, with monthly active user numbers up 24% year-on-year to 271m and revenue growing 124% to $312m. Distributing and monetising content is one of the essential functions of a media company. But Twitter does not see itself as one. Instead, the Twitter line, as expressed by Stanton, is that it is “a technology company that is in the media business”.
“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.
However, following its decision to remove links to footage of Foley’s murder by Islamic State, the distinction Twitter has always drawn between being a distribution platform and content publisher appears less clear-cut. It has been argued that by removing these links, Twitter — which once declared itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” — was introducing a form of censorship and in effect acting as a publisher by exercising editorial control over its content.
Should Twitter ever censor content? “That is a really hard question,” Stanton replies, weighing her words carefully. “There is a very delicate balance between allowing the free flow of information but also, how do we allow and distribute content that could be illegal or could be really disturbing, especially when it happens in real time?”
She notes that the Foley murder video has led Twitter to accelerate the conversation, both internally and externally, about how it should react to such events, balancing defending the user’s freedom of expression with the company’s principles. Nevertheless, lines do have to be drawn. “When there is illegal content on the platform we are obligated to take it down,” she says.
To illustrate her belief that Twitter can have a positive impact, she cites the recent example of the Christian rock singer Vicky Beeching who came out publicly as gay, a decision Stanton says was partly inspired by receiving messages of support on the social media service.
Stanton’s whole career, she adds, has been based on the idea that technology can have a positive influence on the world, by enabling digital engagement and the open exchange of information. As director of citizen participation she started the White House Twitter account and organised President Obama’s first town hall meeting in China, in which he took questions from both a physical and online audience; while at the State department under Hillary Clinton she helped to set up a text-to-donate initiative in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
She believes the White House has taken the same steps to succeed on Twitter that media companies should follow, namely being authentic, being positive, listening to other people and engaging.
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?”
Curriculum vitae
Age 44
Education Rhodes College, Columbia University
Career 1996 associate, Chase Securities 1999 group production manager, Yahoo! 2003 principal, new business development, Google 2009 director of citizen participation, the White House 2010 special advisor, Office of Innovation, US Department of State 2010 vice president of international market development, Twitter 2014 vice president of global media, Twitter
