Vivian Schiller starts as Twitter’s first news partnership leader in early 2014, and the current senior VP for NBC digital wrote a blog piece explaining why she’s leaving the “legacy media” for the second screen.
Most everyone gets that digital media has changed the way content is created, distributed and consumed. And so my former employers and other news organization are doing what they can to evolve their practices. NBC News, where I work today, is currently in the midst of an internal transformation to ensure that everyone is thinking multi-platform and delivering to audiences at the speed and language of the web. This is all good.
Schiller explains the mind shift that occurred when first talking to Twitter about new roles.
When one of those partners — Chloe Sladden at Twitter — reached out about her search for a new role to head up News, my first thought was: “Wow, I want them to find someone great so I can partner with them at NBC.” I gave her a lot of names to consider, mine not among them. But we kept talking, and I met more of her colleagues, and then her boss, and then her boss’s boss. Somewhere along the way it hit me: what if I’ve been going about this all wrong? What if instead of being the digital person in a media company I should be the media person in a tech company? Could those same relationships work in reverse?
Schiller is one of the highest-level old media executives to make the switch to new media, specifically second screen. With over two decades of experience working in news, it will be interesting to see how she expands Twitter’s social TV partnerships with the legacy media she’s leaving.