X, formerly Twitter, wants to make its platform the future and a home for news and journalism. On that front, the company is now hiring John StollFormer editor and Detroit bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal to lead its news group and partnerships team at X. News of the hiring was announced during X Corp's keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2025) in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
After the interviewer Kathryn Herridge When pressed on whether X was considering launching some kind of news portal on its platform, X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino responded that she was excited about the opportunity for journalists to “explore their craft” at X, and make a great living. . The executive was referring to how X's creators can make money through the company's Creator Revenue Share program, which rewards popular content that drives engagement.
On X, creators with paid subscriptions who meet certain baseline requirements in terms of followers and impressions are paid based on the engagement of other premium X users with their content.
Paying journalists based on clicks isn't a new concept — BuzzFeed famously subsidized its hard news with gossip, quizzes and pop culture stories, only to find itself later At the mercy of the Facebook algorithm Change X can certainly update its algorithm at some point to downplay the news, if it makes business sense. (Or perhaps, it'll just curtail the type of news that hates Elon Musk, the owner of X… News from established outlets.)
“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 you're talking to a niche audience to make your budget. And what we want to do is make sure we provide a great place for that journalistic curiosity to come back to.” ,” he added.
Instead, he spoke of a platform where “narrative change is now in the hands of the user” and where “safe speech and two-way conversations” are enabled by which change is inspired.
Iaccarino did not go into detail about Stoll's upcoming duties at X, only that he is leading the news group and partnerships team with a focus on expanding X's news globally.