Caroline O’Donovan of The Nieman Journalism Lab spoke with Sarah Marshall, who is becoming the first social media editor for The Wall Street Journal for news coming out of Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Here is an excerpt:
O’Donovan: So what kind of stuff are you going to be doing? Do you have a sense of that?
Marshall: So, it’s quite a big area. It’s EMEA — Europe, Middle East, and Africa. I don’t know whether the people in the U.S. have the sense of the size of the scale of the Journal, but it’s 450 journalists in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including the newswires. It’s a big team. At the moment, there hasn’t been a social media editor. There are four or five in the U.S., Maya in Asia, and until now Europe, Middle East and Africa haven’t had a social media person. It’s not exactly a clean slate — they’ve been doing Twitter and Facebook — but it’s quite exciting to come in as the first person doing that. They’re really ready for it. There are some individual journalists who are really great on social, and this will mean we can bring them all together and highlight those people, and really, hopefully think about how people share content and what people are sharing. It’s very exciting to be doing it as a new role.
O’Donovan: Are there any platforms you’re excited to experiment with?
Marshall: Quite early on, when Pinterest was still invite-only, I wanted to do a story: Which news outlets are innovating on Pinterest? The one that was doing the most impressive stuff was The Wall Street Journal, funnily enough. I remember thinking, is this really a visual brand? But they created this “How to Use Pinterest” board introducing people to it.I’d really like to crack LinkedIn, I must admit. It’s huge — I don’t think any news organizations have really cracked it yet. I’m guessing it’s a real sweet spot for traditional Journal readers. So I’d love to cracked LinkedIn.
Read more here.
