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Saulo Santana
Berlin & Potsdam, Germany
contact@saulosantana.com

Should news organizations answer readers on social media?

It’s very interesting the analysis that the @NYTimes twitter team made about what they learned during one entire year. They share lot of interesting points, from the post that worked better (and why) to the problems and workflow of photo-credits on their posts.

But what really called my attention was the promise of the team to find ways to interact more with readers, although mentioning moments where he expects, as a news organization, “to remain above the fray”:

When other types of companies face a maelstrom of outrage on social media, they tend to use their social media platforms to respond to people who have been angered, seeing them in part as customers or potential customers. But as a news organization, we expect @NYTimes to remain above the fray to a certain degree, delivering our journalism and not getting caught in the middle of how it is received. It’s difficult to imagine the Times as an institution responding to individual Twitter users like an airline might respond to upset passengers. But finding a suitable way to recognize and engage sincere criticism of our journalism that reaches us via social media would be a suitable use of such platforms. In 2015, we need to spend more time thinking about ways to be responsive to readership that comes to us from social media