[40acres]

For me, Twitter has been the worst thing to happen to journalism. There are a lot of downsides to strong institutions and gatekeeping, but when it comes to journalism I always felt like I was reading The New York Times or The Washington Post and not an individual reporter. The shroud of not getting an up close an personal look put the institution at the forefront.

With social media, Twitter specifically, the journalist becomes the main focal point -- unfortunately the biases comes out as we are all human and you begin to get a closer look at how the sausage is made, how much "access journalism" corrodes coverage, and particularly how non-diverse these institutions are (everyone feels like they went to some Ivy or liberal arts college with somewhat wealthy or well connected in journalism relatives). A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, 'explainers' and data backed reporting are all excellent) from the big institutions but I've totally avoided political and most opinion columns since 2016.

[contingencies]

In defense of social media, the first two weeks of the revolution in Tunisia (the start of the Arab Spring) were completely absent from international media. That taught me a lot about journalism. In the current crisis in China, social media is a very important element in interpreting official reports. It's also important for unpicking PR and marketing fantasies. As we say in Australia, keep the bastards honest.

[Traster]

I think it's actually an issue of journalists on social media. The benefits you're talking about are almost exclusively the effect of 'citizen journalism'. It's a practically new form of direct reporting. However, because of the reach of these real journalists (people actually reporting new information with new perspectives), you have traditional media trying to get in on this. So you've got hundreds of traditional journalists pushing their think pieces on twitter, and their hot takes - all of which have the cumulative effect of reducing trust in the media organisations and creating more heat than light.

[pelliphant]

what's wrong with it taking 2 weeks for news to be reported in other parts of the world?

Do we really need to know what is going on on the other side of the planet right now? Isn't it better to have correct information rather than fast information?

[soulofmischief]

Another take: Traditional news outlets are no longer trustworthy, and will need to begin building new rapport by paying for known and trusted talent.

Journalists will have publishing control, choosing which platforms suit each piece the best. People will have a much harder time discrediting someone with a focused, proven track record vs a business with broad financial and political interests. It's the natural result of a societal emphasis on identity-focused decision-making. We look for other individuals to guide us through things we don't understand. Individuals are relatable. This is why podcasting has swamped radio.

[remarkEon]

> A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, 'explainers' and data backed reporting are all excellent) from the big institutions but I've totally avoided political and most opinion columns since 2016.

As I've gotten older, and become more educated on these specific topics, I've had the exact opposite reaction. Reporting on International politics in particular seems to have deteriorated to the point of being propaganda at best or outright garbage at worst. This is just recognizing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect at scale, I suppose, but to your point what Twitter has done is expose how little these people actually know about the subjects they write about. That seems like a net-good thing to me, since I'd rather we know that the people who pretend to know about the subjects they write about actually don't have at least a baseline understanding of what they're talking about. "Explainers" are probably the worst development here, since this is just advocacy journalism pretending to be "just the facts, ma'am". These "data journalists" have an explicit twitter personae that advocates a specific narrative, and then we all pretend that, for some reason, this doesn't leak into the reporting from the institution they work for.

There's probably no going back from this state, and I doubt that there will be any major changes in hiring practices at e.g. the NYT since this kind of journalism drives a lot of traffic. Cat is out of the bag, so to speak.

[monadic2]

> For me, Twitter has been the worst thing to happen to journalism.

This is the absolute reverse of true: twitter allows accountability of the journalists at outfits you mentioned.

> With social media, Twitter specifically, the journalist becomes the main focal point

If you put your name on reporting, you're accountable for its quality.

> and particularly how non-diverse these institutions are

Au contraire, the papers seem far more obsessed with idpol than twitter, preferring to focus on cults of personality and what their popularity (or non popularity) means than meat and potato issues.

> A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, 'explainers' and data backed reporting are all excellent)

I disagree, but I'll leave the question of why you consider this flavor of reporting high quality up to you to figure it out.

I subscribe to the new york times, the washington post, and the la times, RT, al jazeera, among many other smaller publications. I don't think I could make any sense of the election year, climate change, or international politics without twitter, full stop—you're only seeing half the conversation, or less. Frankly even hacker news has better "reporting" on climate change than any "journalistic outfit" I've read, mostly because it's a massive topic to cover that changes very rapidly and it doesn't sell attention nearly as well as problems that operate within our understood paradigm of how our world should work.

And, frankly, it's hard to imagine an outfit more driven to polarize and work up its base for no discernible reason than the New York Times Opinion section—I can't articulate it better than this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsWj7Q5iPus.

Finally, this entire dialogue neglects that twitter allows journalists to critique each other in public, a distinctly positive thing for journalism no matter what your opinions are about the unwashed masses.

[danso]

I think Twitter has been bad for journalism in that it presents a huge distraction, on top of the dangers of being an echo chamber (which varies depending on who you choose to follow).

But the phenomenon of reporters being able to personally convey their behind-the-scene thinking and experience? I think that’s been a huge boon of valuable, informative insights we previously could only get in memoirs and 10-year anniversary reflections. What you see published as articles is something that’s been trimmed and edited for largely pragmatic purposes and convention, not through some rigorous standard of epistemology.

The NYT’s Rukmini Callimachi is a great example of someone whose tweets greatly enrich her published work. Here is a thread of insights and reporting that became part of a next-day story on Iran and Sulemani: ‪

https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/1213421769777909761

One of the best examples of all is David Farhenthoid, who tweeted the progress of what seemed like a very picayune (relatively speaking) factcheck of Trump's charity claims:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/david-fahr...

> I spent a day searching for Trump’s money on Twitter, asking vets’ organizations if they’d gotten any of it. I used Trump’s Twitter handle, @realdonaldtrump, because I wanted Trump to see me searching.

> Trump saw.

> The next night, he called me to say he had just then given away the $1 million, all in one swoop, to a nonprofit run by a friend. That meant when Lewandowski said Trump’s money was “fully spent,” it was actually still in Trump’s pocket.

Here's a more detailed breakdown of how Farenthold conveyed the progress of his reporting through Twitter, including screenshots of the legal pad he used as a checklist:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/5/13810210/h...

By "picayune", I mean that in late 2016 (e.g. September through November) Trump's charity claims were extremely small-time compared to the actual presidential race. Without a way to publicly convey and accumulate (i.e. snowball) his reporting, Fahrenthold may not have been given enough time (by his editors) to have the critical mass needed for a meaningful story. His work eventually resulted in a Pulitzer-winning investigation, and the impetus for the most damaging ongoing state-level investigations into Trump today:

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/david-fahrenthold

[buboard]

> unfortunately the biases comes out as we are all human

Can you point to an example of any recent article in any US paper that even tries to be objective? Only the BBC pretends to strive for that nowadays.

[ddsea]

Some will disagree with such a glorious assessment of BBC. Often they don't even pretend.

[1](https://bbcwatch.org/)

[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC)

[monadic2]

> Only the BBC pretends to strive for that nowadays.

This remark is hugely ironic if you followed the recent UK election, but they at least have an outside perspective in the US.

[Knulp]

Thing is objectivity can't be reached and Lehrer's says it : the only thing yyou can do is try and be fair. It's a big misconception that medias were objective before. Newspapers have always had political leanings (clear and revendicated as the identity of the magazine) and that just never stopped. To say a media isn't objective with their political coverage is actually the norm and what should be expected. Now if a media trumps a fact in favor of an argument in a paper that explain science, that's wrong. But actually I don't think any media does that (never on purpose. And mistakes usually are corrected).

[thu2111]

To say a media isn't objective with their political coverage is actually the norm and what should be expected.

I think that depends where in the world you live.

In the UK all news broadcasters are required to be neutral and objective by law. They aren't and the relevant regulator is MIA, probably because it's staffed with people who agree with the broadcaster's biases. But it's certainly not the norm there that "people" say media isn't objective. Lots of people still like to claim the BBC at least is objective, despite reams of retired or former journalists going on record to say it isn't.

[secabeen]

Here's a pretty straightforward, factual article about the spread of coronavirus:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/health/chicago-coronaviru...

It clearly describes the spread of the disease in the US, including cited quotations from officials at the CDC and other health experts. It provides some useful additional facts about other similar diseases, and projections about how this disease could spread. Seems objective to me.

[buboard]

an article about a virus?? color me skeptical that it's the rule rather than the exception