If Musk used $44B to buy Twitter only to destroy it and remove it from society, it will have been one of the great unintentional acts of public service this world has ever seen.
Just on a microeconomic level, there seems to be some disconnect here. We keep hearing about how
A) As Josh says, journalists are behaving irresponsibly on Twitter, damaging the credibility of their employers, and making the newspapers less profitable etc.
B) The newspaper industry is dying, there’s a massive overproduction of would-be journalists and other literary types, there’s fewer jobs in journalism every day and starting wages for a writer, especially in a major city, are unlivable.
The synthesis of A and B is that the newspapers hold the upper hand. Just tell your employees not to tweet! You don’t need an excuse. What are they gonna do?
Can confirm as a doctor that medical twitter is very unrepresentative. Among other things, Twitter doesn't really help you do your job any better in medicine and there's limited career benefit for normal doctors on Twitter. So the type of doctor who ends up spending a lot of time on there either spends their free time constantly posting about work, or wants to build a social media-oriented personal brand instead of climbing the career ladder a more normal way.
1. A while back a journalist friend complained to the effect that her ilk (~5k followers) are always trying to get attention from larger accounts and the whole thing is frustrating and sad. I wonder if these newsrooms have low-follower journalists who would enjoy the equalizing effect of a total Twitter ban.
2. That is a beautifully haunting DALL-E right there. Clearly DALL-E doesn't think journalists have good posture though
Getting a push notification on my phone of breaking news about a Twitter poll by Musk was the thing that finally made me cancel my Washington Post subscription. That's not even close to real news.
I'm not sure I believe what I'm asking, Josh, but would it be at all fair for someone to challenge you on the idea that you were able to build a brand and monetize that brand into your own platform via Twitter and that it's unfair to suggest that today's crop of reporters shouldn't be able to do the same thing you did?
I was working my way through a comment asking the same thing. I think it's fair to say that he realized that the way he built his brand was bad for the organizations he worked for while building it, but that would mean locking himself in as one of a relatively small handful of writers "allowed" to have a personal brand in that way
I find myself agreeing with most of it, particularly the productivity part. I work nowhere close to journalism but if I was tweeting all day I wouldn't get anything done.
That said, is there any getting away from an aggregator/microblogging service of some sort any more? These services have massively increased (casual) readership and it'd be a pretty gutsy move to just drop this stuff altogether and go back to the pre Twitter days.
In my mind the biggest benefit is you get to see who the writer really is as opposed to who that writer is when filtered through editors. Exposure to you and Ken through Twitter is the reason I'm even here to write this.
Have they massively increased casual readership? Twitter is generally in the single-digits for share of traffic generated to sites. Facebook and Google are a lot more important, and a reason for MSM outlets to push toward a post-Twitter future is that readers who do use Twitter as a landing page might instead start using their actual landing pages.
To emphasize this point about traffic, here’s what Liz Hoffman at Semafor said in her newsletter today:
“But here’s another data point: On Friday, I tweeted out our scoop that Elon Musk’s money manager was trying to raise more funds for the company, just six weeks after Musk took it private. That tweet ricocheted fast, and ultimately was seen by 4.4 million people – one in 50 daily active Twitter users, according to the company’s latest figures. Just 23,000 clicked through to the story.”
I guess I just don't think dropping Twitter avoids the issues you noted if all they're doing is the same damn thing on Facebook or post or mastodon or whatever else. Is there anyone who's actually left Twitter and not gone on to do practically the same thing at a different place?
I also think there's a symbiosis here - Twitter was where the audience was so more prominent voices came, which builds a bigger audience. Maybe this is just a fork in the evolutionary chain that needs to be cut off.
In any case thanks for the reasoned response. I think I'll always use some form of aggregator and don't love my options at the moment. The fact that I could use Twitter for both hyper local news like council meetings as well as international content is a pretty special combination that's not easily repeated.
As someone who just reads the news, and doesn’t write it, I’m honestly tired of all the outrage and attention Twitter is getting. I don’t care!!! I want to know what’s happening on our borders, I’m worried about Ukraine, Russia and China. Twitter is a distraction I don’t need.
Isn't there a first-mover disadvantage to newsrooms making this decision? It seems like a good way to face employee backlash and get pushed out of your high-status job running a newspaper. I do not work in journalism, but it seems like, as you said, an obvious path from reporter to well-known journalist with more options for making more money and having more freedom is to get popular on twitter. So this would be extremely unpopular and might result in painful departures. So you could envision a situation where Buzbee knows you're right on the merits and has known that for a long time, but she sees it as difficult in the short-term, and might believe she'd be a martyr to the cause if she implemented the policy. Then maybe she gets replaced by somebody who just quietly doesn't change the policy because it was the right decision long-term, but Buzbee ends her career as a PR professional.
So outside of the WSJ, there are only 2 really prestigious newspapers in America (3 if you count the LA Times.)
If your competitor bans Twitter, and their Felicia Sonmezes depart, while you let the good times roll, you are going to become known as “the newspaper that lets whiny ideologues write there.”
Inasmuch as people distinguish among media outlets (presumably publishers believe they do), it’s worth being known as the more disciplined outlet.
Are you saying a potential subscriber would make a purchasing decision based on newsroom twitter policy? Seems unlikely.
But regardless, why limit consideration to those places? There are plenty of other outlets. Josh went back and forth from Insider, NYT, NYMag for example. Plenty of writers go from Wapo or NYT to the Atlantic--like Elaina Plott or Elizabeth Bruenig. Maybe if you tell Douthat not to tweet about movies because AO Scott is doing that for money at the paper he'll just go full time to substack? (Probably not an accurate specific example but you get the point.)
Also, it's not just the Sonmezes of the world who benefit from brand building on twitter. Far from it. Josh admitted he did in the piece. Maggie Haberman benefitted a great deal from twitter, so did Ben Smith and Kara Swisher, for example. The next Haberman, Smith, Barro, Sullivan, Yglesias, Weiss etc. doubtlessly see twitter as part of their immediate strategy for moving up the ladder. And their twitter following, for the time being, in enough cases to be frustrating to management, is very valuable to them.
That’s a good point, but it’s worth distinguishing between ordinary journalists and pundits like Yglesias, Douthat, Sullivan, etc.
The latter are notably opinionated, benefit from having personal brands, and don’t necessarily reflect poorly on their newspapers (inasmuch as people distinguish between an op-ed page and the rest of the newspaper, which is a whole different question.)
Investigative journalists are in a different category though. Who was the author of the last in-depth reportage you read? Maybe you know. Probably you do, but the point is that I don’t, and a lot of other readers don’t; all I know is that I read it in the New York Times. It was a fascinating article, and maybe I’ll talk to my friends about it, but I can’t remember who wrote it.
And if that reporter (whoever he or she is) moves to the Post or the Atlantic, or Substack, they’re not going to carry much traffic with them. Their bargaining power is less than they think!
I wonder if the viewership trends of Left Right and Center after Mr. Barro migrated tell us anything about the bargaining power of personalities because:
1. Mr. Barro was with KCRW for a long time, and was the host of two high profile shows
2. This place has no preexisting user base to convolute, and he made a pretty sharp break, so there's no crosstalk
Personally I stopped listening to LRC a few episodes after he left. I respect the folks running it, and if anything I'm biased towards keeping my subscriptions for free, high quality content vs cancelling them and paying. But it's not the same with new personalities
That is an important distinction but it doesn't map neatly onto the twitter problem Josh describes because:
1. Many reporters like the ones you describe in your third paragraph eventually want to do the jobs you describe in your second paragraph (Ben Smith, John Heilemann, Kara Swisher--the list is endless--all were category A before they were category B) and see twitter as a platform to establish a voice and an audience. Or maybe they want to write a book or become a screenwriter or start a podcast and see twitter as a way to help pitch/sell that endeavor. And:
2. Good luck setting different rules for different types of employees--that would be even more managerially difficult and likely to become a complete mess.
While you're right that an individual reporter may not have much bargaining power, making many of your reporters want leave at once might be too costly for an individual decision maker to decide to take the leap. All I am suggesting is that this problem continues even though the solution is obvious for understandable reasons, and it's not clear to me that Elon being a dick to journalists right now changes that calculus all that much.
As a moderate middle aged manager this makes perfect sense to me which makes me suspect the young leftwing journalists and Twitterati will vehemently disagree, probably for reasons I will find painfully stupid.
Where there's a market, someone will fill it. Mastodon and Post.news are vying to be the Twitter successor, with journalists now Publishing (formerly tooting) and Posting. Maybe this is an opportunity for a newsroom reset. But without proactive decisions soon, all the incentives will re-create Twitter's attention ecosystem for reporters elsewhere.
How might Post's micropayments program change the game? Does your employer have a claim on your tips for material you post in the course of doing your job? If not, that's an incentive to roam even farther from editorial control while angling to launch oneself as an independent superstar.
I agree with the sentiment, but I'm not sure how well this plays out in practice. I think there's some tension between Josh's theory of why Twitter is bad for news and the message that'd be sent by a circumstantially Musk-related pullout.
Saying "we're leaving because of Elon's arbitrary and capricious rule" makes it sound like the paper is affirming, not repudiating, the way their newsroom was interacting with Twitter before Musk got involved and ruined everything. If you want reporters to hear the message that introducing Twitter-style attitudinizing into their approach to covering political stories is a bad thing, then you actually *have to say that.* And, seeing as the longstanding fact of its manifestly being a bad thing hasn't motivated editors to say so yet, I'm sadly doubtful that this changes anything on that front.
Hi Josh — Love the Newsletter, but I’m curious if you plan on continuing the podcast. It was one of my favorite pieces of content during the week. Thanks for all the wonderful content!
It has been an hour, and there is no evidence that you have been either doxed or cancelled. Perhaps, you have made the usual suspects reflect upon their actions....
Good piece. What abt tweets when reporters aren’t working for the institution in question though? Shld you have your current tweets held against you if you end up trying to work for the NY Times again? Also, if tweets build brands, won’t some media orgs attract better talent w/ permissive attitude, thereby undercutting the rationale for restricting tweeting?
At this point, everyone under the age of 70 should understand that once something is on the internet it is there forever, and everyone should be very careful about what they put there (particularly if what they put there might hold relevance for a future job). Whether or not people's tweets should be "held against them," I guess it depends what they're tweeting and why. Personally, I think everything public is fair game when you're hiring someone, particularly if they are going to interact with the public as part of their job (I feel differently about things that were intended to be private but then made public).
That leads to a stuffy, overly careful class of ppl becoming journalists tho. Ppl afraid to ruffle any feathers and push boundaries. Barro says he built his personal brand somewhat by tweeting/social media. Why does he want to deny others that?
It’s not that Twitter is real journalism. It’s that holding it inordinately against ppl may de-select against ppl who are more independent minded. I think it leads to silly results, like the Teen Vogue editor fired for mildly controversial tweets abt Asians (in high school!) and the AP journalist fired for pretty uncontroversial pro-Palestine tweets. That leads to a more stultifying public convo controlled by buttoned-up risk-averse gatekeepers.
Why does it lead to that? The most enduring, successful, and famous journalists of all time were people who "ruffled feathers and pushed boundaries." But I also don't think having "hot takes" on Twitter is akin to doing real journalism, and the two shouldn't be confused. I think Twitter is the end of civilization and if the whole thing went down in flames I would have a party.
I've been thinking recently about the conflict of interest for reporters with large followings on Twitter. They're not shareholders, of course, but the value of their accounts rises and falls along with the fate of Twitter itself. At this moment, they may want Musk to fail, but they certainly don't want their accounts to become worthless.
If Musk used $44B to buy Twitter only to destroy it and remove it from society, it will have been one of the great unintentional acts of public service this world has ever seen.
Just on a microeconomic level, there seems to be some disconnect here. We keep hearing about how
A) As Josh says, journalists are behaving irresponsibly on Twitter, damaging the credibility of their employers, and making the newspapers less profitable etc.
B) The newspaper industry is dying, there’s a massive overproduction of would-be journalists and other literary types, there’s fewer jobs in journalism every day and starting wages for a writer, especially in a major city, are unlivable.
The synthesis of A and B is that the newspapers hold the upper hand. Just tell your employees not to tweet! You don’t need an excuse. What are they gonna do?
Can confirm as a doctor that medical twitter is very unrepresentative. Among other things, Twitter doesn't really help you do your job any better in medicine and there's limited career benefit for normal doctors on Twitter. So the type of doctor who ends up spending a lot of time on there either spends their free time constantly posting about work, or wants to build a social media-oriented personal brand instead of climbing the career ladder a more normal way.
but mah Eric Fingle-Dingle
1. A while back a journalist friend complained to the effect that her ilk (~5k followers) are always trying to get attention from larger accounts and the whole thing is frustrating and sad. I wonder if these newsrooms have low-follower journalists who would enjoy the equalizing effect of a total Twitter ban.
2. That is a beautifully haunting DALL-E right there. Clearly DALL-E doesn't think journalists have good posture though
Getting a push notification on my phone of breaking news about a Twitter poll by Musk was the thing that finally made me cancel my Washington Post subscription. That's not even close to real news.
I'm not sure I believe what I'm asking, Josh, but would it be at all fair for someone to challenge you on the idea that you were able to build a brand and monetize that brand into your own platform via Twitter and that it's unfair to suggest that today's crop of reporters shouldn't be able to do the same thing you did?
I was working my way through a comment asking the same thing. I think it's fair to say that he realized that the way he built his brand was bad for the organizations he worked for while building it, but that would mean locking himself in as one of a relatively small handful of writers "allowed" to have a personal brand in that way
I find myself agreeing with most of it, particularly the productivity part. I work nowhere close to journalism but if I was tweeting all day I wouldn't get anything done.
That said, is there any getting away from an aggregator/microblogging service of some sort any more? These services have massively increased (casual) readership and it'd be a pretty gutsy move to just drop this stuff altogether and go back to the pre Twitter days.
In my mind the biggest benefit is you get to see who the writer really is as opposed to who that writer is when filtered through editors. Exposure to you and Ken through Twitter is the reason I'm even here to write this.
Have they massively increased casual readership? Twitter is generally in the single-digits for share of traffic generated to sites. Facebook and Google are a lot more important, and a reason for MSM outlets to push toward a post-Twitter future is that readers who do use Twitter as a landing page might instead start using their actual landing pages.
To emphasize this point about traffic, here’s what Liz Hoffman at Semafor said in her newsletter today:
“But here’s another data point: On Friday, I tweeted out our scoop that Elon Musk’s money manager was trying to raise more funds for the company, just six weeks after Musk took it private. That tweet ricocheted fast, and ultimately was seen by 4.4 million people – one in 50 daily active Twitter users, according to the company’s latest figures. Just 23,000 clicked through to the story.”
I guess I just don't think dropping Twitter avoids the issues you noted if all they're doing is the same damn thing on Facebook or post or mastodon or whatever else. Is there anyone who's actually left Twitter and not gone on to do practically the same thing at a different place?
I also think there's a symbiosis here - Twitter was where the audience was so more prominent voices came, which builds a bigger audience. Maybe this is just a fork in the evolutionary chain that needs to be cut off.
In any case thanks for the reasoned response. I think I'll always use some form of aggregator and don't love my options at the moment. The fact that I could use Twitter for both hyper local news like council meetings as well as international content is a pretty special combination that's not easily repeated.
As someone who just reads the news, and doesn’t write it, I’m honestly tired of all the outrage and attention Twitter is getting. I don’t care!!! I want to know what’s happening on our borders, I’m worried about Ukraine, Russia and China. Twitter is a distraction I don’t need.
Isn't there a first-mover disadvantage to newsrooms making this decision? It seems like a good way to face employee backlash and get pushed out of your high-status job running a newspaper. I do not work in journalism, but it seems like, as you said, an obvious path from reporter to well-known journalist with more options for making more money and having more freedom is to get popular on twitter. So this would be extremely unpopular and might result in painful departures. So you could envision a situation where Buzbee knows you're right on the merits and has known that for a long time, but she sees it as difficult in the short-term, and might believe she'd be a martyr to the cause if she implemented the policy. Then maybe she gets replaced by somebody who just quietly doesn't change the policy because it was the right decision long-term, but Buzbee ends her career as a PR professional.
So outside of the WSJ, there are only 2 really prestigious newspapers in America (3 if you count the LA Times.)
If your competitor bans Twitter, and their Felicia Sonmezes depart, while you let the good times roll, you are going to become known as “the newspaper that lets whiny ideologues write there.”
Inasmuch as people distinguish among media outlets (presumably publishers believe they do), it’s worth being known as the more disciplined outlet.
Are you saying a potential subscriber would make a purchasing decision based on newsroom twitter policy? Seems unlikely.
But regardless, why limit consideration to those places? There are plenty of other outlets. Josh went back and forth from Insider, NYT, NYMag for example. Plenty of writers go from Wapo or NYT to the Atlantic--like Elaina Plott or Elizabeth Bruenig. Maybe if you tell Douthat not to tweet about movies because AO Scott is doing that for money at the paper he'll just go full time to substack? (Probably not an accurate specific example but you get the point.)
Also, it's not just the Sonmezes of the world who benefit from brand building on twitter. Far from it. Josh admitted he did in the piece. Maggie Haberman benefitted a great deal from twitter, so did Ben Smith and Kara Swisher, for example. The next Haberman, Smith, Barro, Sullivan, Yglesias, Weiss etc. doubtlessly see twitter as part of their immediate strategy for moving up the ladder. And their twitter following, for the time being, in enough cases to be frustrating to management, is very valuable to them.
That’s a good point, but it’s worth distinguishing between ordinary journalists and pundits like Yglesias, Douthat, Sullivan, etc.
The latter are notably opinionated, benefit from having personal brands, and don’t necessarily reflect poorly on their newspapers (inasmuch as people distinguish between an op-ed page and the rest of the newspaper, which is a whole different question.)
Investigative journalists are in a different category though. Who was the author of the last in-depth reportage you read? Maybe you know. Probably you do, but the point is that I don’t, and a lot of other readers don’t; all I know is that I read it in the New York Times. It was a fascinating article, and maybe I’ll talk to my friends about it, but I can’t remember who wrote it.
And if that reporter (whoever he or she is) moves to the Post or the Atlantic, or Substack, they’re not going to carry much traffic with them. Their bargaining power is less than they think!
I wonder if the viewership trends of Left Right and Center after Mr. Barro migrated tell us anything about the bargaining power of personalities because:
1. Mr. Barro was with KCRW for a long time, and was the host of two high profile shows
2. This place has no preexisting user base to convolute, and he made a pretty sharp break, so there's no crosstalk
Personally I stopped listening to LRC a few episodes after he left. I respect the folks running it, and if anything I'm biased towards keeping my subscriptions for free, high quality content vs cancelling them and paying. But it's not the same with new personalities
That is an important distinction but it doesn't map neatly onto the twitter problem Josh describes because:
1. Many reporters like the ones you describe in your third paragraph eventually want to do the jobs you describe in your second paragraph (Ben Smith, John Heilemann, Kara Swisher--the list is endless--all were category A before they were category B) and see twitter as a platform to establish a voice and an audience. Or maybe they want to write a book or become a screenwriter or start a podcast and see twitter as a way to help pitch/sell that endeavor. And:
2. Good luck setting different rules for different types of employees--that would be even more managerially difficult and likely to become a complete mess.
While you're right that an individual reporter may not have much bargaining power, making many of your reporters want leave at once might be too costly for an individual decision maker to decide to take the leap. All I am suggesting is that this problem continues even though the solution is obvious for understandable reasons, and it's not clear to me that Elon being a dick to journalists right now changes that calculus all that much.
As a moderate middle aged manager this makes perfect sense to me which makes me suspect the young leftwing journalists and Twitterati will vehemently disagree, probably for reasons I will find painfully stupid.
Where there's a market, someone will fill it. Mastodon and Post.news are vying to be the Twitter successor, with journalists now Publishing (formerly tooting) and Posting. Maybe this is an opportunity for a newsroom reset. But without proactive decisions soon, all the incentives will re-create Twitter's attention ecosystem for reporters elsewhere.
How might Post's micropayments program change the game? Does your employer have a claim on your tips for material you post in the course of doing your job? If not, that's an incentive to roam even farther from editorial control while angling to launch oneself as an independent superstar.
I agree with the sentiment, but I'm not sure how well this plays out in practice. I think there's some tension between Josh's theory of why Twitter is bad for news and the message that'd be sent by a circumstantially Musk-related pullout.
Saying "we're leaving because of Elon's arbitrary and capricious rule" makes it sound like the paper is affirming, not repudiating, the way their newsroom was interacting with Twitter before Musk got involved and ruined everything. If you want reporters to hear the message that introducing Twitter-style attitudinizing into their approach to covering political stories is a bad thing, then you actually *have to say that.* And, seeing as the longstanding fact of its manifestly being a bad thing hasn't motivated editors to say so yet, I'm sadly doubtful that this changes anything on that front.
Hi Josh — Love the Newsletter, but I’m curious if you plan on continuing the podcast. It was one of my favorite pieces of content during the week. Thanks for all the wonderful content!
It has been an hour, and there is no evidence that you have been either doxed or cancelled. Perhaps, you have made the usual suspects reflect upon their actions....
Good piece. What abt tweets when reporters aren’t working for the institution in question though? Shld you have your current tweets held against you if you end up trying to work for the NY Times again? Also, if tweets build brands, won’t some media orgs attract better talent w/ permissive attitude, thereby undercutting the rationale for restricting tweeting?
At this point, everyone under the age of 70 should understand that once something is on the internet it is there forever, and everyone should be very careful about what they put there (particularly if what they put there might hold relevance for a future job). Whether or not people's tweets should be "held against them," I guess it depends what they're tweeting and why. Personally, I think everything public is fair game when you're hiring someone, particularly if they are going to interact with the public as part of their job (I feel differently about things that were intended to be private but then made public).
That leads to a stuffy, overly careful class of ppl becoming journalists tho. Ppl afraid to ruffle any feathers and push boundaries. Barro says he built his personal brand somewhat by tweeting/social media. Why does he want to deny others that?
It’s not that Twitter is real journalism. It’s that holding it inordinately against ppl may de-select against ppl who are more independent minded. I think it leads to silly results, like the Teen Vogue editor fired for mildly controversial tweets abt Asians (in high school!) and the AP journalist fired for pretty uncontroversial pro-Palestine tweets. That leads to a more stultifying public convo controlled by buttoned-up risk-averse gatekeepers.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed the holidays!
Why does it lead to that? The most enduring, successful, and famous journalists of all time were people who "ruffled feathers and pushed boundaries." But I also don't think having "hot takes" on Twitter is akin to doing real journalism, and the two shouldn't be confused. I think Twitter is the end of civilization and if the whole thing went down in flames I would have a party.
I've been thinking recently about the conflict of interest for reporters with large followings on Twitter. They're not shareholders, of course, but the value of their accounts rises and falls along with the fate of Twitter itself. At this moment, they may want Musk to fail, but they certainly don't want their accounts to become worthless.