Under its new owner and CEO Elon Musk, Twitter announced in December a plan to ditch its current verification badges for a new paid subscription service, Twitter Blue, that will give anyone that blue badge on their account for $8 a month. As Twitter prepares to remove the badge from the older, non-paying, Twitter accounts on April 1, many major media outlets are already stating they won"t be joining in this new business plan.
Oliver Darcy, a reporter for CNN, posted, ironically, on his Twitter account, that he contacted several media companies, and all of them stated they will not be paying for their employees to get that new Twitter Blue badge. One of them is the New York Times, which told Darcy "We aren"t planning to pay the monthly fee for verification of our institutional Twitter accounts."
New: The New York Times says it is not planning to pay for Twitter verification:
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) March 30, 2023
"We aren"t planning to pay the monthly fee for verification of our institutional Twitter accounts," a spokesperson tells me.
The NYT also won"t pay to give its reporters Twitter Blue badges "except in rare instances where verified status would be essential for reporting purposes."
The comments were the same for other media outlets that Darcy heard from. The Los Angeles Times said it felt Twitter Blue "verification no longer establishes authority or credibility". Politico felt the same way, stating, "In the future, a checkmark will no longer mean you are a verified journalist. Instead, it will simply mean you are paying for benefits such as longer tweets and fewer ads."
In related news, Twitter finally revealed the revamped plans and terms for its APIs on Wednesday night. There will be three tiers for API access. One will be free, but will only be for "write-only use cases and those testing the Twitter API with 1,500 Tweets/month at the app level". A second Basic tier will cost $100 a month and will be for users that have 10,000 read requests a month and 50,000 posts per month. The third tier is for enterprise users and offers full access. Twitter has not publicly revealed the price for this tier, but it"s expected to cost thousands of dollars a month.
Twitter added that its ads API will be available to all of its customers "including developers on the new Free tier." It says that it is still working on ways to offer its APIs to academic users.