Twitter CEO sees journalists as curators of tweets
Evan Williams, founder and CEO of Twitter, kicked off the Online News Association conference in San Francisco. — The format was a fireside chat, except before an audience of hundreds of journalists, academics and developers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Evan Williams opened the Online News Association's San Francisco conference with a fireside chat before an audience of hundreds of journalists, academics, and developers, casting journalists as curators of tweets. It extends a year of explaining Twitter to outsiders — his March 2009 Charlie Rose appearance was an earlier, halting attempt to walk a mainstream audience through what the service actually is.
The timing matters. In the week beforehand, Twitter closed a large round with Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley, confirmed it is saving and archiving every user tweet, and shipped its Suggested User List — which immediately drew criticism, jealousy, and frustration from prominent users left off it. paidContent's pickup of the talk carried Williams's parallel message to the other constituency in the room: '@ONA09: Twitter's Ev Williams: We Try To Be Respectful Of Developers.'
First-order effects
- Journalists in the audience get a direct framing of their relationship to the platform — Twitter positions itself as the raw material and journalists as the filter layer on top, not as competitors or mere sources.
- UX lead Britt Selvitelle's announcement that Twitter will soon launch Twitter Labs gives the developers at the conference a near-term product pipeline to build against, reinforcing the developer-friendliness pitch in the same breath as the journalism pitch.
Second-order effects
- News organizations weighing official Twitter workflows now have the founder's blessing to treat curation as a job function, which pushes editors toward tooling and staffing for selecting from the firehose rather than ignoring it.
- The Suggested User List backlash shows how much power default curation carries on Twitter itself, so any journalist-as-curator model sits beside a company whose own hand-picked list of accounts is already being fought over — curation authority is becoming contested terrain on both sides.
Third-order effects
- If the framing holds, the structural division of labor becomes platforms supplying real-time material and archives (Twitter has confirmed it preserves every tweet) while newsrooms supply verification and selection — making journalism operationally dependent on infrastructure it does not control.
- That dependence sharpens the tension Williams himself flagged toward developers — being 'respectful' while the company grows on fresh institutional capital — over who ultimately controls distribution: open APIs and developer ecosystems versus curated defaults chosen by the platform.
The trend: Real-time platforms are recasting journalism around filtering — reporters as curators of streams the platforms own, archive, and increasingly pre-select.