What's in a Guest Tweeter: Lockwood's NSFW Tweet on Behalf of TNR

Blink and you missed it: Patricia Lockwood took over The New Republic's Twitter account recently, and sent a NSFW tweet to Donald Trump. The Atlantic elaborates on the moment in a piece called "Guest Tweeting, the Latest Chapter in a Fraught Journalism Tradition." "I’m not going to mess around with any 'barnyard expletive' obfuscation here," writes Adrienne Lafrance, "but, needless to say: This is not a family tweet." More:

What had happened, a colleague informed me, was The New Republic had handed over the reins of its Twitter account to a guest publisher. That publisher was the poet Patricia Lockwood, who had written an essay for the magazine about attending a Trump rally, and who usually tweets from her own (funny, irreverent, often R-rated) account.

“Imagine the enormous amount of trust it must require for an established journalistic institution to allow me to hijack their twitter account,” Lockwood had said on Twitter before taking over.

Which is pretty much what I was wondering. Or, more pointedly, what kind of news organization would do that?

Apparently several of them. The New York Times Magazine has had guest Twitter publishers. Modern Farmer, too. Dan Sinker, of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project and a self-described goat ambassador, didn’t drop any F bombs while manning Modern Farmer’s Twitter account during goat week, which is a real thing.

[...]

If you view a Twitter timeline as a continuum, as a sum of many tweets, giving someone temporary access to an news organization’s institutional account would be a little bit like having someone randomly jump in and add a few sentences to a story written entirely by another person. Which is fine, I guess, depending on what you think Twitter is for.

Maybe it’s a place to experiment and to be playful and, okay, occasionally get too weird in the process. Hey, that’s arguably better than the opposite instinct: That thing where mid-market metro dailies just tweet out headlines and links with no personality or engagement whatsoever. But it’s also a strange choice for a news organization.

Find the full story at The Atlantic.