Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

‘Hi Haters’: Why New Jersey’s Twitter Account Is Like No Other

With brassy quips and state-centric memes, @NJGov is trying to burnish New Jersey’s much-maligned reputation.

Megan Coyne, left, and Pearl Gabel have injected sassiness into the state’s official Twitter account, significantly increasing its number of followers.Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

The two women who run New Jersey’s official state Twitter account, Megan Coyne and Pearl Gabel, know all about the reputation their home state has developed over decades.

They are all too aware that New Jersey has often been derided as “the armpit of America” and ridiculed for the odor that the moniker implies. Though they both identify as “Jersey girls,” they know that phrase calls up a stereotype that many residents deeply resent.

They realize that when outsiders reference “dirty Jersey,” it’s not generally a term of endearment. The first glimpse of the state for many visitors is a trip from Newark Liberty International Airport along aging highways that pass a vast and unattractive industrial waterfront.

The women know it all. And on @NJGov, the Twitter account they run, they own and embrace it.

“Armpit what,” read one tweet from last month, with a stunning video from the Jersey Shore. “Hi haters,” said another. A third simply said “dirty jerz” and pulled in more than 4,000 likes.

“New Jersey’s been kind of the butt of national jokes for so long,” said Ms. Coyne, a digital assistant in the governor’s office. “It has not the best reputation among people, and we really wanted to change that.”

Ms. Gabel, her boss, put it another way.

“Jersey fresh. Jersey strong. Jersey girl. Jersey whatever,” she said, essentially rattling off a list of Garden State hashtags. “We’re Jersey.”

Over the past two years, Ms. Coyne and Ms. Gabel have channeled their innate, deeply felt love for New Jersey into a bold, sassy social media account that has generated considerable attention on Twitter, where celebrities, thirsty brands and influencers compete for clicks.

Perhaps more impressively, the two have managed to distill a playfully combative New Jersey swagger into state-centric memes and quips that feel authentic both to the internet and to the Garden State itself.

“New Jersey is all about attitude, edginess, pride, diversity,” Gov. Philip D. Murphy said in an interview. “We speak our mind. We don’t hold back, we don’t shy away.”

The Twitter account run by Ms. Gabel and Ms. Coyne has managed to synthesize all of that while at the same time spreading information about state policies and informing the public of crucial news, he said.

Image
Gov. Philip D. Murphy, center, said, “New Jersey is all about attitude, edginess, pride, diversity.”Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

“Pearl and Megan are nothing if not completely and utterly authentic,” said the governor, a Democrat whose own Twitter account is far more sedate than his state’s. “I know them well enough to know that, but I think it screams out in the posts that we put up.”

Among those posts are needling jabs at neighboring states, an emoji-filled outline of New Jersey that launched a bagel war and New Jersey-specific twists on beloved memes, including a picture of the much-adored Baby Yoda holding the Garden State that has become @NJGov’s profile picture.

Other government accounts have also recently tried to take a more humorous approach. New York City’s Conflict of Interest Board has drawn on slang and memes, making the often dry conversation around government ethics more accessible. The city’s Police Department’s precincts have also tried a lighter tone and emojis to soften their public safety announcements.

Still, among states, New Jersey seems unusual for how successfully it has infused its online presence with such brashness.

Take Delaware’s account, @delaware_gov, with which New Jersey is in an ongoing Twitter feud. That state has taken a more staid approach to its social media and has about a third as many followers as @NJGov despite being about a decade older.

Perhaps no one message encapsulates New Jersey’s Twitter attitude better than “your mom”— a two-word tweet sent last December that vaulted @NJGov into the spotlight.

At the time, Ms. Gabel and Ms. Coyne had been running the Twitter account for months, mixing standard public-service announcements with their brand of Jersey humor. They had generated a modest following, to the extent that a curious internet user saw their tweets and questioned @NJGov’s reason for being. “Who let New Jersey have a Twitter,” he wrote.

Both women took umbrage.

“I was like, ‘That’s so rude,’” said Ms. Coyne. “And Pearl was like, I kind of want to respond, ‘your mom.’”

Ms. Coyne began laughing hysterically. Ms. Gabel, who sits in the cubicle next to her, took that as a good sign. After about 30 seconds of consideration, the pair sent the playground taunt to the online ether.

“We didn’t think about it,” Ms. Coyne said. “I don’t think we imagined it being the banger that it was.”

The tweet went on to pick up more than 80,000 retweets and generated a handful of news articles. In the day that followed, @NJGov nearly tripled its followers from 17,000 to more than 60,000, according to data provided by a Twitter spokesman.

“‘Your mom’ is the gold standard,” Ms. Gabel said without a hint of irony. “‘Your mom’ is the standard that we measure everything against.”

Ms. Gabel, 38, joined Mr. Murphy’s administration as its digital director when the governor took office. It was a return to her beloved home state after years in New York City, where she worked as a journalist before joining Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office as its director of video.

At the time, New Jersey’s online presence was “a digital wasteland,” she said. So for months, she overhauled the state’s website, launched social media accounts for Mr. Murphy and worked with state agencies.

Ms. Coyne, 22, joined her full-time after she graduated from Rutgers University last June. That’s when the two began discussing how to make @NJGov, originally conceived as a way to stir up state pride and distribute important government information, more authentic and relatable.

The Twitter voice of New Jersey comes from a fusion of both women’s sensibilities.

Ms. Coyne, who identifies as a digital native and first joined Twitter when she was 13, is the one with deeper meme knowledge who keeps abreast of current online trends. Ms. Gabel, who described herself as an older millennial, supplements her employee’s online savvy with one-liners and cheeky clapbacks.

Both women also have the state firmly at their cores. Ms. Gabel was raised in Monmouth County, and even during her years in New York City, she never cast off her New Jersey pride, she said.

Ms. Coyne grew up in Livingston, a bedroom community about 20 miles west of Manhattan, and has lived in New Jersey her whole life.

“We’re both Jersey Girls, but we do have different personalities, different interests, different strong suits,” Ms. Coyne observed. “And the way they mesh — it’s perfect.”

Recurring themes on @NJGov include the joys of not pumping one’s own gas (self-service stations are banned in the state), the heated battle over whether a certain processed meat product should be called pork roll or Taylor ham and a frequent insistence that Central Jersey is a region independent from the state’s north and south.

“People outside might be like, what are they talking about and why do you care?” Ms. Gabel said. “But for some reason — like, this is how we grew up. And it’s part of our DNA and we just get it.”

For Mr. Murphy, it is the two women’s innate understanding of a certain kind of Jersey attitude that makes their approach so successful. While he expects other states might catch on, he was skeptical that they would be as successful.

“Do you have the attitude, the character, the humor, the edginess, the pride that all wrap together to define New Jersey?” Mr. Murphy asked. “To me, that may be the biggest X-factor in this.”

Ms. Gabel, for her part, would love to see more states embrace their stereotypes, warts and all, as a way to spread regional pride and engage people in the political process.

“Imagine if, like, Minnesota came out tweeting in a Minnesota accent,” she said. “That would be off the hook. It would be awesome.”

Even so, Ms. Gabel doesn’t think @NJGov’s particular brand of humor can be exactly replicated.

“We’re a little state with big state energy,” she said.

Michael Gold is a general assignment reporter on the Metro desk covering news in the New York City region. More about Michael Gold

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Hi Haters’: The Women Behind New Jersey’s Tweets. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT