As the page put it5/19/09; 11:59:09 AM Pacific
What are the people of the NY Times saying on Twitter?
The New York Times river was one of the first siblings, and the one the app's own Blog link pointed to: a post dated May 16, 2009, about following the people of the Times. The idea was simple. Instead of reading the paper's main account, which mostly posted headlines, read everyone at the paper who had signed up, all at once.
The capture from the morning of May 19 shows what that looked like. In about six and a half hours the river collected 100 tweets from 28 accounts. Section feeds sat next to reporters' personal accounts, and the busiest posters were not the best known. The technology blog's feed and the metro desk's City Room each posted more than the paper's best-known columnists that morning, and only three accounts in the river had six-figure followings.
In 2009 most newsrooms had no Twitter policy to speak of. Reporters joined on their own, tried it out in public, and some of them stuck with it. A river like this one caught that moment: a newspaper seen as a crowd of individual people rather than as a masthead.