X, the site formerly known as Twitter, has hired John Stoll, a former Wall Street Journal editor and Detroit bureau chief, to lead its news group and partnerships team.
Stoll’s hiring was announced by X CEO Linda Yaccarino on-stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas—she said she was “pretty excited” about the hire.
However, Yaccarino didn’t go into detail about Stoll’s new job at X, only that he was leading the news group and partnership team with a focus on expanding news on X at a global scale. She said that Stoll would bring its plan to incentivise journalists on the platform “to life” and expand it to a “global scale”.
Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal ad exec, was asked by interviewer Catherine Herridge whether X was considering launching a news platform. In reply, Yaccarino said she was excited about the opportunity for journalists on X to “explore their craft,” thrive, and make a great living through its creator revenue sharing program.
On X, users with a paid subscription who meet certain baseline requirements in terms of followers and impressions are paid based on engagement from other Premium X users with their content.
“When we look at the sad, challenged state of journalism today, when you think [about] journalism under pressure from financials… The future of news is not legacy media,” Yaccarino said during the CES keynote.
“Legacy media news has become almost like a fan service to make sure that you’re speaking to a niche audience to make your budget. And what we want to do is make sure that we provide a great place for that journalistic curiosity to return,” she added.
“We want to make sure that we pay off our promise to incentivise the livelihoods of journalists who contribute to the fair press that the citizens of the world are missing,” she said.
“The shift in control and the shift in the narrative is now in the user’s hand” and societal changes are protected and encouraged on the platform by “protected free speech and a two-way conversation.”
Thrilled to join @lindayaX @CES after the Zuckerberg / Meta / Community Notes announcement..
And what’s ahead @x in 2025!https://t.co/mlBz97ZYzU
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) January 7, 2025
Overnight, Meta, parent company of Facebook, announced a shock change in its approach to content moderation. Instead of actively taking down content, it would use a Community Notes-like system in which users correct misinformation posted by others similar to that pioneered on X.
“How cool is that?” said Yaccarino.
“I think it’s really exciting that when you think about community notes being good for the notes. Think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time. It couldn’t be more validating than to see Mark and Meta realise that.
“Mark and Meta realised that it’s the most effective, fastest fact-checking without bias.”
