Twitter’s Head of Moments Andrew Fitzgerald Is Leaving for Hearst TV

Janko Roettgers

Twitter’s Director of Curation Andrew Fitzgerald, who has been heading the team behind the company’s Moments feature, is leaving to become Hearst Television’s new Chief Digital Content Officer. His duties at Twitter are being taken over by Joanna Geary, who has been with Twitter since 2013 and previously worked for the Guardian.

At Hearst, Fitzgerald is now going to be in charge of producing content for multiple digital platforms. “Helping to connect the great work of Hearst Television’s journalists to nationwide audiences across digital platforms will be an incredible opportunity to provide crucial perspectives to our national conversation,” he said in a statement.

“Digital publishers recognize that their content must be widely available on social platforms to have the broadest reach,” said Hearst TV chief strategy and business officer Roger Keating. “Andrew is an ideal addition to our team to help ensure the excellent journalism produced by Hearst Television connects with the widest audience possible on all platforms and screens.”

Fitzgerald joined Twitter in 2011 and had been heading Moments, its curated tweet feature, since the company began working on it in 2015. “We built a story-telling product that allowed us to leverage this vast, global network of voices and information to stitch together into narratives,” he wrote in a Medium post announcing his departure Friday. “And you know what? I’m super-biased, but I think we did it really well.”

Twitter officially launched Moments in late 2015, and opened it up as a creation and tweet sharing tool to all of its users a year later. The company has yet to release any meaningful data on the usage of Moments, but it’s arguably not been a secret weapon to magically reverse the company’s fortunes. The company has added only a modest amount of additional users in 2016, with growth in the U.S. particularly more or less flat throughout the year.

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