The Chicago Tribune listed top executives and editors by their Twitter IDs in the newspaper’s masthead Thursday instead of by their real names.
“I’ve been on Twitter a couple of years, since it first emerged from South by Southwest, and so I’ve been on it for awhile, as you would hope that the digital editor of the Tribune” would be, said Bill Adee, the paper’s digital editor. “And in the last month or so, we’ve really tried to get our reporters and editors on (Twitter) to show them how it could make them better reporters and editors.”
He added that, “If you’re a reporter or an editor, Twitter is a great way to get in touch with your audience in real time, and if you do it right, if you follow the right people in your sphere of knowledge, you will get a lot out of it.”
And, in an experiment to show the many Twitter users among the paper’s audience that the Tribune gets the microblogging service, and to make it easy to get in touch with the top editors and executives, the publication decided to publish, for one day only, the Twitter-friendly masthead.
