“The Coolest Twitter Job in New York: @rachelsterne” |
| The Coolest Twitter Job in New York: @rachelsterne Posted: 05 Feb 2011 09:08 AM PST The coolest job in Twitter has to be the one held by Rachel Sterne at New York City's Office of Media and Entertainment. Who is Rachel Sterne? The short answer is that she's a 27-year-old techno entrepreneur hired to tweet about New York City at a $115,000 annual salary. You can tell a lot about Rachel Sterne from her tweets. She's basically nice. Pretty smart. A bit edgy. Cool? Well, yeah, but it's the $115,000 salary that makes her job the coolest job in Twitter. Because, you see, there are lots of people tweeting cleverly, and for free. I'm in basic Twitter training, so I don't number myself among the clever people, you'll agree. Aside from the dorky name, Twitter is a lot racier than staid old Facebook, which chugs along with a Goldman Sachs valuation of $50 billion -- sure death for the avant garde Twitterati. The official title for Rachel Sterne's job is "Chief Digital Officer." Some faceless bureaucrat in Media and Communications HR apparently decided that a job with a $115,000 salary shouldn't sound like it was fun. Sterne is asking for suggestions regarding her job description on Quora, another one of those Q-and-A sites. Quora is like Yahoo! Answers, except it is designed to be less fun and to have a narrower appeal. It's sort of a cyber-Mecca for the techno-elite, broken down into thought neighborhoods. Now here comes the sticky part. Should the taxpayers of New York City pay for praiseful tweets about the POTUS? What if a New Yorker doesn't want to pay city taxes used to promote President Barack Obama's political aspirations? On Jan. 12, Rachel Sterne tweeted she was "inspired by @Barack Obama's speech this evening. It was the healing our country needs." Healing? Wow, we must be really hurting. Fortunately, Sterne's tweets were distinctly political, and not religious. Should she slip and tweet some quasi-religious aphorism, the public outcry will be so loud it will be heard from Battery Park to the Cloisters, drowning out the clamor raised by the mayor's support of the Ground Zero mosque. To be fair, Sterne is also posting useful information regarding the mayor's schedule. This could be a problem for a mayor, who refused to tell the news media his whereabouts during a recent blizzard that shut down the city while maintenance workers sat in their plow trucks, some playing cards. Sterne struck a cautionary note in the more recent snowstorm: "RT @ dens : Peeps in NYC: careful outside, it's literally a sheet of ice out there. Wear something with traction." "Peeps" is cool, distinctly hip-hop. That "wear something with traction" line smacks of mommyism, entirely consistent with a Mayor who wants to follow San Francisco in banning smoking in open air public places. One veteran New Yorker worries that the city's elite habit management class will be raiding apartments for cigarettes and Happy Meals. AllahPundit threatens to leave New York and move to Texas. Clearly, AllahPundit doesn't get New York's transmogrification into a social media hub. Sterne tweeted that the city is in a "moment of transition when citizens move from customers to partners. That doesn't sound like the Rachel Sterne her friends know. Rachel Sterne is sorta cute in an unadorned kind of way. There's a studiously plain Jane photo appearing on Portfolio.com. While Portfolio sighs that Sterne's efforts has not yet picked up speed, my prediction is that Rachel Sterne will soon rank among New York City's famous. I'm following her, anyway. @rachelsterne. You might want to, also. Anthony Ventre is a freelance writer who has written for several weekly and daily newspapers, for Demand Studios, and for AOL. He lives in Stroudsburg, Pa., and writes about topics impacting a tri-state area. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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