The future of Twitter's watchdogs

Twelve years since the creation of the iPhone and forums like Facebook and Twitter, the norm for journalists across all platforms is to have an intense following on multiple social media platforms: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and even into the juvenile realms of TikTok and SnapChat.

In this 2019 scholarly study on social media and journalism, a newspaper was quoted to say to its staff, “If you’re not on Twitter, get an account already—and make sure you have at least a few hundred followers by the end of the year. We’ll be tracking your activity.”

Such intensity reflects how quickly this trend has grown in the watchdog field.

Beloved journalists of the 20th century—like Walter Cronkite, Edward Murrow, Martha Gellhorn—didn’t have this demand (because it wasn’t around). Yet, they produced incredible, trustworthy work that are still preserved, quoted, and admired today.

So, is this new online forum necessary? And what does it hold for the future?

Photo by Caleb Oquendo from Pexels

Journalism is adaptive

As phones got smarter and social media got popular, the traditional print media of journalism plummeted in readership. Even online newspaper readership dropped.

“A Pew Research Center analysis of data from AAM [Alliance for Audited Media] shows that total weekday circulation for U.S. daily newspapers – both print and digital – fell 8% in 2016, marking the 28th consecutive year of declines,” which you can see here.

This is due in part to the quick, easy access of all kinds of new social media brought to its users.

Why read a newspaper from earlier today instead of this online article I found on Twitter that was updated two hours ago? Why read a long article when headlines are written for the ironically small spaces on the infinite storage of apps?

The power of the audience determines the rise of journalism on social media. They pick and choose what they want to read, so content automatically becomes a competition—a survival of the fittest in the vast landscape that is the internet.

Journalism is adaptive and wants to reach the biggest audience—right now. As a whole, its institutions cut off any useless portions to get the information out to readers as fast as possible.

The telegraph led to the inverted pyramid in the same way mobile devices led to a revolution in digital structure. Shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences, shorter words. Embed, link, tag.

Social media seems frivolous, until we realize how it’s changed everything.

Photo by Ono Kosuki from Pexels

Citizen journalism broadens

The fundamentals of journalism are still the same in that truth should be at the heart of every story, while facts and opinions are two separate entities. And then there’s the story.

But, it’s safe to say journalism will never return to what it once was.

All you need is a phone and a platform to become a journalist today. Then, you build a large enough audience, winning them through interesting and interactive reporting.

Some veteran journalists feel this waters down the sources for accurate and fair reporting. But, with media companies becoming as partisan as Colonial papers, many argue that citizen journalism allows for multiple voices to be heard, for multiple sources to be exposed.

From this perspective, social media has helped journalism. The average person is now politically aware and interested in what’s going on around the world because the information is right there at their fingertips—between the post about dogs with shoes and your cousin’s wedding.

Two months into 2021, the debate of whether social media is professional enough for journalists is nonexistent.

Now, it’s a matter of keeping up with the trends at all costs…for the sake of preserving the watchdogs.