What Twitter Should Do: The New York Times Opines with Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Ideas
June 14, 2015
Well, advice from the gray lady about what a digital company should do is fascinating. Frankly, I would be more inclined to go with Snoop Dogg than a newspaper which seems to have made floundering and gesticulating its principal business strategy since Jeff Pemberton walked out the door 40 years ago.
Wowza.
Navigate to “for Twitter, Future Means Here and Now.” Keep in mind that this link may require you to pay money or go on an Easter Egg Hunt for locate a hard copy of the newspaper. Not my problemo, gentle reader. It is the dead tree New York Times’ approach to information.
Here’s one of the passages I circle in yellow and then put a black Sharpie exclamation point next to the sentences:
Twitter, as a service, is many things to many people at different times. It is one of the world’s best sources for news and for jokes about news, a playground for professional networking, and a haven for that most human of pastimes, idle gossip. But because the service offers so many uses, Twitter, as a company, has had trouble focusing on one purpose for which it should aim to excel. The lack of concentration has damaged its prospects with users, investors and advertisers. Choosing a single intent for Twitter — and working to make that a reality — ought to be the next chief’s main task. Among the many uses that Twitter fulfills as a social network, there is one it is uniquely suited for: as a global gathering space for live events. When something goes down in the real world — when a plane crashes, an earthquake strikes, a basketball game gets crazy, or Kanye West hijacks an awards show — Twitter should aim to become the first and only app that people load up to comment on the news.
There you go. Make Twitter into a human intermediated version of the New York Times, lite edition. More data, less filling, and you trim your IQ as well.
I find that journalistic enterprises in the midst of revenue, profit, and innovation swamps have advice to give to digital companies fascinating. I wonder if the gray lady assumes that the stakeholders, Twitter management, and the advisers to the firm have failed to craft options, ideas, tactics, and strategies.
My hunch is that like many Internet centric communication services one rides a curve up due to novelty and apparent utility. Then a new thing comes along like WhatsApp or Jott, and the potential users of the older service just surf newness. Once the cachet fades, a phenomenon with which the New York Times may be familiar, the options just don’t deliver.
Amusing to me, however.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2015
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