Marcus Mabry: from The Times to Twitter

Marcus Mabry - Photo: Erica Lansner

Marcus Mabry – Photo: Erica Lansner

When I decided to leave The New York Times, I braced myself for a slew of questions and skepticism. “What?” “Leave The New York Times?” “Are you crazy?”

When I came to the Times from Newsweek more than eight years ago, friends and family had, literally, said to me, “Wow. Now you’re at a real news organization.”

And even among journalists, especially our tribe of foreign correspondents, editors and global news junkies, there are few institutions as highly regarded as The New York Times. The Times stands for something superlative in our business – and rightly so.

So when I made the decision to leave my editor job there for a post at Twitter, the social media company, I was expecting a lot of push back. The biggest surprise? Hardly any came.

From the highest levels of the Times, where my bosses and the publisher were classy as hell! to my literary agent – not one person in publishing didn’t understand why I was making the change.

My new job at Twitter, to be fair, would have been hard for anyone interested in the future of journalism to turn down. We are trying something totally new, developing an entirely new form of storytelling, taking the now ubiquitous building block of Twitter – the 140-character tweet and using it to construct stories. Some news, some feature. With a whole bunch of video and photography mixed in.

This has never been done before.

What editor could turn down such a challenge?

I couldn’t.

Twitter Moments, which I now edit, launched a few weeks before I arrived. A team of curators in the old days we could as them to re-write scan the Twittersphere and the Internet for developing news stories and compelling feature stories.

For the uninitiated, the Twittersphere is the whole messaging system where anyone in the world can send a message to anyone else in the world. There are 500 million tweets on average every day. Journalists and
celebrities use Twitter a lot. For the former, it is an extraordinary way to stay up on the news and to share stories. For the latter, there is no more powerful tool for staying in contact with fans.

The power of Twitter – and all social media to connect everyday people was never on greater display than during what was known as The Arab Spring of The Awakening. Although the historical events surrounding the pro-democracy uprisings in 2010 and 2011 have turned dark in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East, it was initially an exuberant embodiment of people power that forced sclerotic, despotic regimes to change, or die.

The Arab Spring originated in Tunisia in December 2010 and quickly took hold in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.

And the young people who led those revolutions used Twitter to organize and mobilize and fight back. Some had long had private Facebook pages where they congregated away from the eyes of the regimes. That is harder today as the regimes have grown up in places like Egypt have insinuated themselves into these networks and/or monitor them, so they are never surprised again.

Twitter Moments is meant to be a way to get all the regular folks who don’t use Twitter to use it. We make stories just like a newspaper and we look a lot more like a website or a news app on your phone. We are definitely not aimed at the current heavy users of Twitter namely journalists! We are intended for folks who are not familiar with it.

But I think a lot of journalists will find us useful in the way they have always found Twitter useful: when they need news in real time from sources on the ground, whether reporters, citizen journalists or just refugees living the news.

And, again, I ask, what editor could resist that opportunity?