| > 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. |