Inside the Integrity Institute Slack,
asked:So I have a question for this community... which totally outs me as an aging gen Xer, I think, but since that's no secret ... I've seen quite a few articles and such about "I can't use X-twitter for news any more this is terrible what shall I do?" and I'm.... mystified. Isn't this what news media is expressly for? With the current demonstrations of X's terrible info quality, and the none-too-great record of social media over a decade-plus now... why not just, ah, read an online newspaper? (Or a few, to get some variety of perspectives on topics where one source might be a bit close to the material)? Quite seriously, what's the attraction of wading through a mess on social media and tracking down various "osint" sources when someone else is already being paid to seek out, verify, and collate current, accurate information for you in readily-consumable formats? I'm asking to understand, out of genuine confusion, not to dunk on social media readers....
(Sharing with his explicit permission)
There were a lot of thoughtful responses! Here was mine, slightly cleaned up:
Here’s my alternative perspective as a former/current heavy twitter user:
What I want from “news”:
Surface what I would care about
Surface what I “long term”/need to know, even if I don’t short-term want to see it
Rooted in more-or-less my values
Options for people to add commentary on the links/news. Especially things like: “don’t forget this person XYZ terrible judgement about [big test of morals or judgement, e.g. Iraq war]
See discussion about the news by people I trust or at least want to follow
Some of those desires are opposed, or at least need balancing
Many of those desires are rooted in “which people do I trust” and “which people do I trust to surface the right news”.
The ~2008 blogosphere was amazing for me at this
The ~2014 twittersphere was good at this too
I’ve spent over 10 years honing who I follow, setting custom lists, and “training” twitter what I consider junk and what I consider gold.
I really really really miss Nuzzel, which was perfect. The signal of twitter minus the noise. I mourn it all the time
Imagine a service that looks at every news link that people you follow posted in the last <window of time>, and shows you the new articles that are most commented on, with the commentary attached
The alternatives and how I feel about it them:
One newspaper: inevitably will have screwups or Terrible Takes. How will I know that happened without access to commentary? A monopoly of information
News aggregator: bloodless. weird tendency to veer into celebrity bullshit, sports, or other stuff I don’t care about. Often includes worse versions of the news by TV outlets or other sources that are one-step-above blogging/aggregating
Substack: Too much opinion, not enough linking to stuff I could read that was written by professional journalists. Too much “psyche! to read beyond the first five paragraphs, pay five dollars a month”
Reddits: probably the answer, tbh. But the “commentary” will mostly be by 15-year-olds, not wise people I trust
I went on to add:
Let’s make it more concrete: my news interests include: world news, politics news, social movement stuff, inside baseball on this industry and a few others, ukraine war stuff, israel, linux/open source world, cybersecurity.
I don’t think there’s a newspaper that really fits that. Any given news outlet will cover a few of these topics, not at the depth I want, and have lots of stuff I don’t care about that I need to wade through.
Second point: often, once I read a thing in the paper, I’d want to know what people I trust who are very smart and well sourced in that industry/niche think. For example: “this is the best explainer of X I’ve seen this year” (where X could be iOS 0-days, or the internal politics of the labor movement in Seattle, or whatever else). Or “if you read X, but also Y, you’ll get a great sense of the two dominant narratives on this topic”.
That kind of meta-explanation and annotation is not really what news organizations do. Blogs and journals (like The New Republic, for example) used to do that, and still kind of do, but that vibrant era is gone.
Postscript: I have two main use case for twitter these last few years. The first is what I laid out. The second, to be clear, is via lists.
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1037444145273393152 — people for whom I want to read every tweet
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1568069931954216965 — Ukraine war.
If those people posted anywhere else, I’d follow them there instead.