Periscope isn't sweating Facebook Live, but hires first Editor-in-Chief

Periscope's executives may tell you they're not feeling the pressure of endless waves of fresh Facebook Live broadcasts from brands, media companies, celebrities and everyday folks. But their actions tell a different story.

On Monday, the Twitter-owned live-streaming platform hired Evan Hansen as its first Editor-in-Chief.

Hansen is a seasoned technology journalist who spent years at CNET and Wired (as Editor-in-Chief of the website). However, it may be his most recent experience that attracted the attention of Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour.

For the last three years, Hansen has served as Medium's Head of Content Labs (he also describes himself as Editor on his LinkedIn page). Medium is both a self-publishing platform and a content destination and has become a popular platform for everyone from Presidents to investigative journalists and, perhaps not coincidentally, Periscope's own blog.

In a Medium post announcing his departure, Hansen describes shepherding the development of numerous Medium brands, including the tech-centric BackChannel (run by Steve Levy), as well as partnerships. It all put Medium on the cutting edge of media. Now it appears Hansen wants to help Periscope build itself up as a new kind of content platform.

"I honestly can’t think of many things more exciting than helping build a new platform with mobile phones and real-time video," wrote Hansen.

Twitter and Periscope won't comment specifically on the new hire, but Beykpour did offer his congratulations to Hansen on, naturally, Twitter.

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The decision to bring on a true content lead could mark a turning point for Periscope. Up till now, the primary vehicles for discovery have been the Periscope Map and a linear list of who is live now on your Periscope app. More recently, Twitter made it possible to view live Periscope videos right in the Twitter timeline, which means it's a now easier to stumble on the platform's live video.

According to a job description posted by Twitter, Hansen, who starts on May 16, will be responsible for, among other things:

• Developing a curation strategy
  

• Building a global editorial team
  

• Managing the social strategy for highlighting content
  

Organizing and highlighting all that streaming content (earlier this year, Beykpour told me Periscope served 110 years' worth of content per day) will be quite an undertaking. It will be interesting to see if Hansen builds some kind of vertical channel structure and maybe even a programming schedule.

When I asked Beykpour about Facebook Live in April, he brushed it off and told me, "If we spent our time worrying about competitors, we wouldn’t actually build anything of value to the world."

Even so, Facebook Live is being touted as the next big media opportunity, a challenge to that Hansen is surely being hired to meet.

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