It’s hard to quite understand what’s going on at the Times. I have a few theories, but I’ll leave those for another time. They have handled their social media strategy in a very curious manner. I would think the key to be being a good social media editor is to have a lot of experience and be willing to experiment.

@Gina,

I think you’ve nailed part of newspaper culture. Newspapers don’t have many experts, and people often work on beats that they aren’t really passionate about. That has to stop. People are starting up beatblogs all the time, and when someone starts a beatblog, it’s because he really loves that beat.

Hard to compete with that.

On the same token, news orgs need people who really love and get social media.

Assignments are often (too often in my opinion) doled out based on many political reasons or because the person was due for a promotion or because the person is most free or the person always does a good job with new things or because the person isn’t doing a good job in a current position or because the person is trusted to “not go too far” with this wacky stuff. Be clear: I’m not saying that’s the case with Jen Preston because I have no way to know why she got the job. I’m talking in general.

What I’m saying is I think it’s somewhat foreign to newspaper culture to assign the person who just innately loves something to that job. It’s not that newspapers want to be mean; it’s just the profession prides itself on its “jack-of-all-trades” mentality where anybody can cover anything. Beats, for example, aren’t necessarily assigned on interest initially, although sometimes this happens with more senior folks.

The person who innately loves social media and uses it and gets it probably isn’t high enough on the newspaper hierarchy to get the “social media editor” job, so it goes to someone above that person who might not get social media or may not even want the job. Or the newspaper may create the position and fill it without letting the staff know that this new social media editor job is available, so the social media junkie who’d be really good at it has no chance to apply or show how good he or she would be at it. (I’d guess that many doing the decision-making level don’t have always have a handle on who really gets social media in their newsroom.)

I’m sorry if this sounds like I’m bashing newspapers. I don’t mean to. I’m sure this kind of thing happens in many fields. But I think it’s a shame when it applies to newspapers because I believe social media can really help the news media.

I’ll second your sentiment that “many of my best lessons were learned from doing (and sometimes falling flat on my face)”—(shameless self-plug coming): Go look at some of my early blog posts and tell me they’re not brain dead. But I also corrected myself when necessary and probably came out better for having taken my lumps.

I don’t know, maybe the New York Times just doesn’t like the thought of looking amateurish and wants to study up before jumping into the deep end.