Now Hiring Social Media Editors

ABSTRACT

Social Media Editors (SME) are involved in digital news circulation, engagement with online audiences, and the analysis and circulation of audience data. This article extends research on SMEs to investigate how employers make sense of these positions and the roles they are required to perform within news organizations. To do so, we analyze job listings for SMEs posted by US news companies in combination with interviews with SMEs. Employers play a significant role in defining journalism as a profession, and job announcements are indicative of how managers envisage journalism roles. Our findings suggest that, although employers explicitly seek candidates with journalism backgrounds, the most common job requirements for SMEs are more closely aligned with marketing skills and tasks than traditional news work. Further, our interviews indicate ways in which SMEs are maneuvering to redefine their positions in ways that better meet their professional goals. SMEs are pushing to assume higher-level and more strategic roles by moving away from comment moderation and direct social media audience engagement. The boundaries of the SME position are thus under constant negotiation within the newsroom and between journalists and their employers.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism roles
• labor market
• marketing
• metrics
• news industry
• skills
• social media

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, in our interviews with social media editors in the U.S., we found that a few journalists who had succeeded in pushing their jobs away from routine comment moderation toward more substantive forms of online engagement (i.e., soliciting subscribers for story ideas, crowdsourcing elements of newsgathering or data collection, and so on) preferred and advocated for more expansive titles like “audience engagement editor” versus the more narrow scope implied by “social media editor.” This said, the core duties of these journalists, especially their nodal position between the news organizations and data streams from news consumers, remained surprisingly consistent despite variations in their exact titles (Neilson and Gibson 2022).

2 Ethics approvals for this research were granted by the George Mason University's Institutional Review Board and the Arts Faculty Ethics Subcommittee at Macquarie University.