Everything you’ve been wondering about AP’s sponsored tweets: A Q&A with the people behind them
Now that we’re more than halfway through the AP’s sponsored tweet experiment, most journalists and consumers seem to have settled into one of two camps: The AP is selling its soul and forsaking its audience, or the AP is doing what it must to survive.
To recap: During CES this week, the newswire’s main Twitter feed is sending out two sponsored tweets per day from Samsung, both of which direct to a website Samsung set up for CES.
News organizations have been posting sponsored tweets for years, but the AP’s entry into the trend has been under particular scrutiny, and reaction has been wildly mixed. Some consumers and journalists have been perturbed or disappointed, others understanding, and some are downright furious.
We caught up with AP managing editor Lou Ferrara, who oversees social media in the newsroom, and Eric Carvin, the AP’s social media editor, and asked about the backlash, how the tweets have affected the account, what the future holds and more.
