Vivian Schiller to Leave NBC News for Twitter

In a bid to reinforce Twitter’s mutually beneficial relationships with the news industry, the social networking giant on Thursday appointed Vivian Schiller to a newly created position, head of news and journalism partnerships.

Ms. Schiller, the chief digital officer for NBC News, will leave NBC and join Twitter in January. At Twitter, she will oversee partnerships with news organizations like NBC, NPR and The New York Times; she worked for all three organizations earlier in her career...

The job listing spoke of making Twitter “indispensable to newsrooms and journalists.” Part of Ms. Schiller’s job will be to suggest improvements to Twitter’s service that will support journalists.

Twitter already employs a number of liaisons to the news industry (who train journalists about how to use the service, for example) but Ms. Schiller is the first senior-level representative.

In the mid-2000s she was the senior vice president and general manager of The Times’s Web site. She took over NPR, the public radio organization, in 2009 and was credited with speeding up its adoption of digital technologies, though she abruptly resigned in 2011 after the organization was consumed by two politically inflammatory controversies. She joined NBC News a few months later, when the news division created the chief digital officer position for her.

though she abruptly resigned in 2011 after the organization was consumed by two politically inflammatory controversies.

Is the NYT too afraid to expound on the details of that little event that I certainly recall? You be the judge: (from https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/vivian-schiller-npr-ceo-resigns-aftermath-james-o-keefe-hidden-camera-video-article-1.120657

Vivian Schiller, the CEO of NPR, resigned Wednesday, a day after an undercover video showed another NPR exec calling Tea Partyers "racist."

Schiller's resignation was accepted with "understanding, genuine regret and great respect for her leadership of NPR these past two years," Dave Edwards, the chairman of NPR's board of directors, said in a statement.

No reason was given for Schiller's departure in the statement. But the media oulet's board chairman, Dave Edwards, told NPR's David Folkenflik that she was forced out.

Edwards said although Schiller wasn't personally responsible for all of the mistakes, "the CEO of any organization is accountable for all of the operations of that organization...We determined that it was the wise move for us to accept her resignation and move on."

In the sting video, NPR's former fund-raising chief Ron Schiller (who is no relation to Vivian Schiller) was caught on camera slamming conservatives and the Tea Party movement. He also said the news outlet would be better off without federal funding.

The video was a project by conservative activist James O'Keefe, who gained notoriety after he tarnished ACORN's reputation in a series of secretly recorded videos in 2009. The latest video shows Ron Schiller meeting with two actors hired to act like Islamic philanthropists.

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