X, formerly Twitter, wants to make its platform a home to the future and news and journalism. On that front, the company has now hired John Stoll, a former editor and Detroit bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal to lead its news group and partnership team at X. The hiring news was announced on Tuesday during X Corp’s keynote at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.
After interviewer Catherine Herridge pushed as to whether or not X was considering launching a news portal of some sort on its platform, X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino responded she was excited about the opportunity for journalists on X to “explore their craft,” thrive, and make a great living. The executive was referring to how creators on X can make money through the company’s creator revenue share program, which is how it rewards popular content that increases engagement.
On X, creators with a paid subscription who meet certain baseline requirements in terms of followers and impressions are paid based on engagement from other Premium X users with their content.
Paying journalists based on clicks is not a new idea — BuzzFeed famously subsidized its harder news with gossip, quizzes, and pop culture stories, only to find itself later at the mercy of Facebook algorithm changes. X certainly could update its algorithm at some point to downplay news, if it made business sense. (Or perhaps, it would simply downplay the type of news that X owner Elon Musk seems to hate…like 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 that you’re speaking to a niche audience to make your budget. And what we want to do is make sure that we provide a great place for that journalistic curiosity to return,” she added.
Instead, she spoke of a platform where “the shift in the narrative is now in the user’s hand” and where change is inspired by what’s allowed by “protected free speech and a two-way conversation.”
Yaccarino didn’t go into detail about Stoll’s upcoming responsibilities at X, only that he was leading the news group and partnership team with a focus on expanding news on X at a global scale.