"Most of the people who work for him are very bad at being on Twitter, and their tweets truly are just not good. And then their bosses are so obsessed with Twitter too, and on edge about it. A cycle of humiliation ensues. They spend all that money on editors and then people just write stuff willy-nilly online? Whatever for?! Twitter looms prominently for journalists because it’s how they get jobs, distribute their work, and make friends. Twitter also helps journalists feel and be seen inside a system that will otherwise make them feel invisible.... Reporters confuse their Twitter audience for the actual world. For obvious reasons (Caucasity), most of these reporters are on the joyless, scold-y White Twitter, which is the opposite of all this.... There’s a meme, certainly popular inside the Times, that Twitter instills some kind of self-feeding censorship. Baquet might hate this most of all; he despises fearfulness."
Writes Choire Sicha in "Journalism’s Twitter Problem Is the Journalists" (NY Magazine).
Does Sicha really know Baquet's motive? Here's more about Baquet's memo at The Hill. The memo made Twitter and other social media optional, and the reason given was that journalists were relying "too much on Twitter as a reporting and feedback tool" and creating "echo chambers." It said those who do stay on Twitter ought to "meaningfully reduce" the time they spend there.
There's also the question of disparate impact: If women are more likely to be harassed on social media — or even if they just worry that the are — then a requirement (or near-requirement) — to tweet is something management might want to avoid. If efforts are made within an organization to create an inclusive, comfortable climate for different kinds of workers, then perhaps it should avoid forcing them into the hostile environment that is Twitter.
There's a certain way that people talk at each other on Twitter — that is rewarded on Twitter — so a requirement to tweet favors the kind of people for whom that kind of talk comes easily. Why would you want that to infect the structure of success in your business?
To return to Sicha's hypothesis: "Baquet... despises fearfulness." He could just as well be yielding to fearfulness. There is complexity to the fear of social media!
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31 comments:
We need twitter equity for twitter twatter challenged
In addition to being a paid racist, Ms. Sicha could use an editor.
so, how does this tie into Elon Musk, and his quest for "free speech"?
“Caucasity”? Is that like “whiteness”? Remember when believing race is a real thing, and that your racial group membership had something to do with the kind of person you are was called “racism”?
Yeah, the guy who fired Donald McNeil because McNeil had “lost the newsroom” clearly despised fearfulness.
As far as I can tell from reading what gets posted from Twitter, the limitations of expression encourage and reward wit over wisdom, and bumper-sticker argument over serious exposition. Even the longer multi-post 'rants' favor a listicle-style hammering on talking points over more subtle exploration of a topic.
Welcome to the journalism circle-jerk, New York Mag/NYT edition.
Women (in the classic sense) may be at a disadvantage in the open competition, so there also should be a women's division. Trans women without bottom surgery are eyeing the championship trophies in the women's competition with a proprietary air.
Dean Baquet put out a further memo today: "Twitter gives us power if we use it properly. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair." New York magazine was unable to discern his exact meaning.
Sometimes a shitbird is just a shitbird.
“Caucasity”?! What bilge! One thing I notice when I see the bylines of a New York Times article is that there aren’t a whole lot of Robert Smiths and William Joneses these days. Many names look foreign, and not in a Caucasian way.
"Baquet despises fearfulness."
What in God's name is he in the news business for! These grooming pansies won't even touch Hunter's laptop! Modern mainstream journalism is nothing but fear, when it's not working hand-in-hand with the CIA that is...
Translation: I am concerned about People honing in on the truth: that Twitter is simply a left-wing echo-chamber/message-enhancer.
Fearless is not a word that describes the NYT.
Anything in there about the “reset” having anything to do with Musk buying a stake in Twitter?
The “reset” reminds me of Hilary and the Russians.
The walls are closing in! Elons gonna get them!
On Armenian-American Day every city in the country is a Caucacity.
Bari Weiss has had more than a few things to say about the effect of Twitter on 'journalists'. She boils it down in one sentence here: "Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor."
The New York Times is a mess. The minds of their 'journalists' are all f**** up and that was made possible by their universities. To grasp at things like Caucasity as a contributing cause to this problem is a pretty out there racist thing. But, as we all know, certain kinds of racism are acceptable in todays 'thinking' class. And the claim that women are more likely to be harassed on social media is just that- a claim. How do you know this? Everyone is open to being harassed on Twitter. It might be that women, being the privileged victim class that they've worked so hard to become, are just playing out when they get a typical haranguing on Twitter.
There's always the option of just dropping Twitter. It's not like the Twitter Police come into your bedroom in the dark of night and force you to sign on and download the app or your cat will be beheaded. People sign up for that garbage heap and then claim victimhood when it does what it was built to do.
But using Twitter as the 'style guide' for the NY Times is something William Safire could not have seen in his most creative days.
Gee if the reliably lefty NYT finds Twitter is an “echo chamber” — and it is — then we’ve got a genuine moment of truth from the executive editor. Will he take the logical and needed next step of explicitly banning the use of random twitter posts that his writers use liberally to fluff up their opinion pieces?
There are very few Caucasians in the world. Using the term to describe all whites is like using the term Mongoloid.
One of the legacies of slavery is that the progeny of slaves have difficulty tracing their ancestry. Not much difficulty for most whites and Asians.
Of course, as whites in the US have inter-married among ethnicities over the past 50 years, the concept of ancestry has dissolved a bit.
The census still allows those identifying as white to select among ethnicities and most do. If a person’s ancestry is half German, a quarter Irish and a quarter Italian then she might choose any of them. More have been choosing American.
Sicha's looking to get hired.
Baquet abdicated his ethics and his responsibilities to Social Media, but held on to the corner office.
How old is Taylor Lorenz, again? Has she turned 40 yet? And yet here she is, still basking in the perpetual teen-crisis-of-attention dramas of her own creation, mutton masquerading as lamb. Sad.
Most journalists with a major media byline harm their reputations by tweeting. They reveal their ugly shallow sides, with hot takes that bring to mind the old "better to be silent" aphorism. For the most part, the ones who are good at it are freelancers who have to be good at it for their paychecks.
"The census still allows those identifying as white to select among ethnicities and most do. If a person’s ancestry is half German, a quarter Irish and a quarter Italian then she might choose any of them. More have been choosing American."
I chose Kentuckian.
an inclusive, comfortable climate for different kinds
Separate but equal.
On the 70's hit show Adam-12, Malloy and Reed were always on the lookout for a male cauc, which sounds redundant.
Hmmm. "Caucasity". I remember reading antebellum writers describing Blacks as being in a "state of Negritude", glad to see NY Magazine has finally made it to the Nineteenth Century.
"If women are more likely to be harassed on social media ..."
Althouse, no one can even define "women". So how could it be possible for harassers to target them?
Twitter looms prominently for journalists because it’s how they get jobs, distribute their work, and make friends.
This is why it's so outrageous that we as a society allow Twit algorithms and useless Twit pinkhair activists to silence dissenting voices by permabanning their accounts, banishing them to the Web ghetto.
The ones who aren't silenced must constantly pull their punches. Not because what they say is wrong, but because what they say triggers the wrong Trigglepuff in Santa Clara.
In the world of yellow journalism that is the NY Times, WaPo, etc., these days. Twitting is their bread and butter.
Donald Trump was good at Twitter because he took it at its name
Twit --[OE. atwiten, AS. [ae]tw[imac]tan to reproach,
blame; aet at + w[imac]tan to reproach, blame; originally, to
observe, see, hence, to observe what is wrong
--
To vex by bringing to notice, or reminding of, a fault,
defect, misfortune, or the like; to revile; to reproach; to
upbraid; to taunt; as, he twitted his friend of falsehood.
[1913 Webster]
This these scoffers twitted the Christians with.
--Tillotson.
[1913 Webster]
If Twitter went away tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
Sure, something would come along to fill the gap, but just how could it be worse than what we already have?
Twitter is where his employees get the news they report. Everyone likes to work from home, and this is how NYT writers do it.
No need to go obtain factual information anymore...just repeat what some politician or celebrity tweeted along with the mob's response.
Add in a personal opinion or two, the obligatory Trump insult, and call it a day.
The Times making a big deal about Twitter sounds like an admission that the old media are dying or already dead. If a short and pithy tweet delivers the political spin that is the newspaper's chief product, who needs to wade through all the misinformation and lack of information that the paper's actual articles provide?
Do the two sources give very different views of what the memo says or am I misreading the snippets? Maybe that's the secret of good bureaucratic memos: they are so ambiguous that they can be read in radically different ways.
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