Social Media Staff Editor, Social Media Strategy, The NY Times

>> My name is Daniel Victor. I'm the staff editor for social media at the New York Times. So my role is largely one day a week I run the main NYTimes Twitter account. Other days I work with the Metro and Sports desks on how to integrate social media best into their reporting, how to train the reporters and use crowd sourcing tools, tips, tricks, finding ways to put social media into the reporting process. Well the great thing about it is that it has become just such a powerful reporting tool. As a reporter in the old days you might have to, you would only have access to a certain amount of people, maybe the people that you already know that are already in your Rolodex, maybe the people who happen to be on the street when you go on the street. Now you have access to this vast network of people who never had access to the newspaper before. So using social media you can make your reporting better, you can have a better connection to your readers and they can have a better connection to you. At a traditional newspaper the-- at least when I started out-- the focus was on the next day's paper. It was almost singularly on that. I think that the difference for a dot come is that there's always something new that you can be trying out. There's always some new platform. There's always some new tip or trick, whereas a newspaper you tended to focus on that print product. Newspaper organizations have gotten much better about embracing the web and embracing those new platforms, so a good print product like the New York Times that has a good web portion as well, I think that's the ideal place to be. I love that in this role we get to kind of combine the core tenets of traditional journalism with all this fun new stuff of social media and everything else that's emerging in the journalism world. It is so crucial that we're verifying what we put out there just as much as it was when we're putting it in print. Sometimes it seems as though there's a conflict between being first and being right, and I don't see it that way. I think if you're not first, you're not right. It's as simple as that. So we like taking all, every little bit of the news writing skills, the ethical skills that we learned here at Penn State, and translating that to the news system.