#WANIndia2009: AP hiring new social media editor; launching new experiment this week

The Associated Press (AP) is recruiting a new social media editor to lead a series of experiments for the agency.

The new role will oversee a team of two based in New York and will be responsible for developing the agency's social media strategy, Kathleen Carroll, AP executive editor, told Journalism.co.uk at this week’s World Association of Newspaper's (WAN) and World Editors Forum (WEF) conferences.

The recruitment is part of wider restructuring at the AP, which has seen the creation of regional news hubs.

For the last four years AP has had a social media monitor, who has monitored how breaking news stories are covered and developed on social news sites, in particular with a view to finding new content for these stories. But in the summer it ran its first experiment in using social media tools as a traffic driver, explained Carroll.

In partnership with Yahoo, the agency tweeted, blogged and brought readers' questions into its coverage of judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the US Supreme Court in July.

The 'Sotomayor experiment' generated more traffic than was anticipated, but also raised some questions for the AP when using social media.

The lack of a destination site and interacting directly with users rather than clients, for example through allowing comments on AP articles, are significant challenges for the AP when it comes to social media, said Carroll.

The AP will this week announce details of its next social media experiment - each project is designed to help the agency better understand what tools are best used for covering certain events and answer questions about social media newsgathering and distribution.

"For example, how close do you have to be to an event you are blogging about (…) We need to know if there was something special about that event [the Sotomayor hearing] or its timing that made it successful," said Carroll, adding that the trials will move from covering scheduled events to breaking news.

The AP is planning to work with more partners on its social media projects and the next experiment will be a collaboration of different media partners, potentially including local media AP members.

"We're looking for different platforms to drive traffic to that have meaningful relationships for a news wholesaler like us," said Carroll.

Echoing comments made at Monday's digital session at the conference, Carroll said working out where social media fits with AP's business model is also a challenge.

The agency will also use its social media experiments to explore what advertisers could gain from such coverage and how revenue could be generated.

All #WANIndia2009 coverage from Journalism.co.uk at this link.

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