One year later, calculating the damage Elon Musk has done to Twitter

Elon Musk. Photo (cc) 2017 by Steve Jurvetson

This past Friday marked one year since Elon Musk purchased X/Twitter and took a wrecking ball to it. Twitter was far from perfect — we all called it “the hellsite” long before he arrived. But he’s done everything he could to drive it into the ground, empowering trolls, restoring extreme-right and neo-Nazi accounts, and enabling disinformation on a widespread scale.

Musk took specific actions to degrade the experience as well. He ended a modest paid-subscription service that allowed you to edit your tweets. He got rid of the blue checks for verified accounts and replaced them with blue checks for anyone who was willing to pay, thus greatly amplifying hate and falsehoods. He blocked access for anyone who didn’t have a Twitter account, which blew up embedded news feeds. And he proved that he himself was among the most sociopathic users of the service he’d purchased, engaging in such behavior as amplifying an online wilding campaign against a young journalist and putting her life in danger.

The results for Twitter as a business have been devastating. The Washington Post reports (free link):

The number of people actively tweeting has dropped by more than 30 percent, according to previously unreported data obtained by The Washington Post, and the company — which the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX has renamed X — is hemorrhaging advertisers and revenue, interviews show.

The Post also reports that Musk has succeeded in moving Twitter far to the right. My own experience is that a number of conservatives who I’d like to follow on one of the new platforms that have sprung up or grown in response to Musk’s actions have stayed put, almost as a sign of tribal loyalty. Not everyone — certainly a lot of the Never Trump conservatives have moved elsewhere. But it’s enough that the old sense you had on Twitter that everyone was there has fractured, probably forever.

After Musk bought Twitter, I went all-in at Mastodon, which had already been around for several years. But though I was able to build a decent list of followers and have found engagement to be quite good, most news organizations and prominent people are missing. Bluesky, co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, seems like the closest thing to a direct Twitter replacement, but it’s falling behind because of its incredibly aggravating invitation-only scheme.

Which leaves us with Threads, part of the Zuckerborg. It’s definitely the fastest-growing of the alternatives, and it’s where I spend most of my social-media time these days. It’s also adding features quickly in an attempt to catch up. Threads got off to a fast start when it was launched during the summer, lagged, and now seems to be taking off again. Mark Zuckerberg said last week that Threads now has 100 million monthly users — no doubt well behind Twitter (Musk took the company private, so he’s free to lie about metrics), but impressive nevertheless.

Yet I find that there are three buckets of Twitter users that I need to connect with who aren’t going anywhere: friends who are not extremely online; Massachusetts politics folks; and people and organizations involved in the future of local news. For some reason, they’re still firmly planted on Twitter.

Twitter was far from perfect — very far indeed. It had become a frequently ugly place, and a lot of us were already using it differently compared to, say, 10 years ago. But Musk has made it much worse.

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Talking about the future of local news on ‘Left, Right & Center’

I had a chance to talk about the future of local news on KCRW’s “Left, Right & Center” podcast — as well as offer some analysis of the media’s failures in reporting on that hospital explosion in Gaza. We recorded in front of a live audience last Thursday at WBUR Radio’s CitySpace. Please give us a listen. The host is David Greene, joined by Mo Elleithee, Sarah Isgur and (this week) me.

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Book review: Marty Baron has written a plea for journalism that isn’t afraid to tell the truth

Photo (cc) 2017 by Álvaro García Fuentes

For more than eight years, The Washington Post experienced a second golden age. From late 2013, when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the storied paper for $250 million, through the early months of 2021, when Donald Trump left the White House and a new administration began to settle in, the Post was firing on all cylinders. Thanks to Bezos’ strategic investments in technology and an expanded news report, the Post emerged as a real competitor to The New York Times for the first time since the 1970s.

That second golden age also overlapped with Martin Baron’s time as executive editor of the Post. In his new book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” Baron tells the story of those years, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the end of the legendary Graham era; how Bezos quickly transformed a shrinking, mostly regional newspaper into a national digital media outlet; and the challenge of covering Trump, whom Baron frankly, and repeatedly, calls an “authoritarian.”

I’ve covered Marty Baron off and on for years, back when he was editor of The Boston Globe and I was the media columnist for The Boston Phoenix, and later when I was reporting on the Post for my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century.” Baron is both accessible and accountable, but he can also be intimidating and a bit defensive. He deserves his reputation as the best editor of his era, not just at the Times but at the Globe and, before that, the Miami Herald. Continue reading “Book review: Marty Baron has written a plea for journalism that isn’t afraid to tell the truth”

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I have a question for Media Nation readers. When I switched from WordPress.com to a hosted service a few months ago, I discovered that my posts no longer have “Leave a Comment” automatically embedded at the top. It’s part of the WordPress theme that I use, and there’s no fixing it short of switching to a different theme, which I don’t want to do, or delving into the code, which — uh, no.

As a result, I’ve been typing “Leave a Comment | Read Comments” at the bottom of each post when I publish it. Do you think it’s necessary, or is it’s so obvious that you can leave a comment that I can omit that step? I’d like to know what you think, so please comment on comments.

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Following the shootings, two Maine papers drop paywall while the Globe goes all-in

The Sun Journal of Lewiston, Maine, and the Portland Press Herald have dropped their paywall for coverage of the mass shootings in Lewiston on Wednesday night, which claimed what’s now reported to be 18 lives. The two papers, which are owned by the same nonprofit trust, have also published a sensitive story about some of the victims — six at the moment, with, sadly, more to come.

Meanwhile, The Boston Globe is treating this as a local story, going all-in with multiple reports. Today’s print edition includes four front-page stories, ranging from a round-up of what we know so far to a story on Maine’s gun laws. There are two opinion pieces and four more articles in the metro section covering topics such as the fear experienced at nearby Bates College and how teachers should discuss mass shootings with their students. The Globe is also running updates on its homepage.

For journalists, this is difficult, harrowing work. I’ve covered some emotionally upsetting stories, but never anything remotely like this. While we focus on the suffering of the victims, think about the reporters, too. Like first responders, journalists are performing a vital role in keeping the public informed about an ongoing tragedy.

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CommonWealth, a policy-oriented nonprofit, will rebrand and expand

CommonWealth Magazine is about to unveil a rebranding and an expansion. The nonprofit website, which covers state policy and focuses on “politics, ideas and civic life,” will be reborn as CommonWealth Beacon on Nov. 1. I’m a member of the advisory committee, and we just finished a meeting at which the redesign was unveiled. It’s clean and minimalistic, and it translates well to mobile.

CommonWealth is part of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, which I would describe as centrist and serious. The magazine ended its print edition in 2018, so the digital rebranding is long overdue. The journalism will remain free, though Beacon will offer various paid membership tiers with extra goodies.

The best part is that the project is staffing up, having added two reporters and two people to work on audience engagement and fundraising. Content will be available for free to other publications in the hopes that the local news startups that have sprouted in Massachusetts will use it to bolster their coverage. The email that went out to readers earlier this afternoon follows.

Dear CommonWealth reader,

We are writing today with exciting news:

On November 1, CommonWeath will become CommonWealth Beacon, a new name for a new era of expanded civic journalism for Massachusetts.

The decline in for-profit journalism, the rise in misinformation and the increasingly fractured and polarized civic culture underscore the need for a response. We believe independent, non-partisan, non-profit civic journalism is an essential antidote to these troubling trends.

That is why we have been working to develop a strategy and find the resources to fuel an expansion of our journalism. We took time to learn from our peers across the country, craft a business plan, and raise the seed funding that would allow us to hire more people and build a sustainable business model. In recent months, we have hired four new people — two reporters and two people to work on reader engagement and fundraising — to prepare for the launch of CommonWealth Beacon.

Rest assured, CommonWealth Beacon will retain much of what our readers love about CommonWealth — non-partisan, original reporting on the issues that matter to Massachusetts residents. As we grow, we can cover more stories, across a wider range of issues, with more detail and expertise:

    • CommonWealth Beacon will also feature a renewed commitment to long-form journalism through CommonWealth In-Depth and a rebranded opinion section called CommonWealth Voices.
    • Look for new polling about Massachusetts and our weekly podcast, The Codcast, kicks off with a live discussion at 3:15 pm ET on November 1 about the state of Massachusetts democracy with Harvard professor Danielle Allen.

We also intend to give our content away to other news outlets in Massachusetts to help strengthen local news coverage across the state. In the lifeboat of local journalism, no one is a competitor and everyone is a potential collaborator.

We see CommonWealth Beacon as a partnership among civic-minded people who understand that independent journalism is essential to a functioning democracy. As a subscriber to our newsletter, you are already a partner. We invite you to deepen your engagement by encouraging others to subscribe, by joining our membership program (details to come very soon), and by giving us feedback so we can improve. CommonWealth Beacon will be a collective enterprise and we need as many people as possible to get involved.

Thank you again for helping us to get to this exciting moment. We see this as just the beginning with much more to come in the months ahead.

JOE KRIESBERG
CEO

BRUCE MOHL
Editor

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Another mass shooting underscores why people are turning away from news

The front page of today’s Portland Press Herald

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center reported the results of a survey that found news consumption fell significantly between 2016 and 2022: “In 2016, 51% of U.S. adults said they followed the news all or most of the time. But that share fell to 38% in 2022, the most recent time we asked this question.”

Now we are in a moment of real horror and crisis. From war in Ukraine to Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel to the retaliatory response that’s now under way; from chaos in Washington to another terrible mass shooting, this time in Lewiston, Maine — it’s no wonder that people are tuning out. Who can process all this?

With the shooter in Lewiston still at large, it’s a good time to take another look at “The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook,” compiled in 2013 after an earlier mass shooting. Given that initial reports are often wrong, there’s little reason to watch the story unfold in real time. Catch the top of the hour if you must, but otherwise wait for something more comprehensive and vetted.

And here are some Maine-based sources of coverage:

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T&G editor says he held Fattman story because it lacked ‘confirmation’

The Telegram & Gazette of Worcester published a story with some mighty odd timing. Like many media outlets, the paper reported Tuesday that state Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office had reached a settlement with state Sen. Ryan Fattman and his wife, Worcester Registrar of Probate Stephanie Fattman, to end a three-year investigation into campaign-finance improprieties.

But wait. The T&G story, by Kinga Borondy, includes quotes from an interview with the Fattmans conducted at Sen. Fattman’s Statehouse office last Friday. “There was no finding of liability, no admission of wrongdoing,” Ryan Fattman was quoted as saying.

On the surface, it looks like the T&G held important news about campaign-finance irregularities for four days. Lance Harris, who writes the Central Mass. Politics blog, wrote on X/Twitter: “Wait. The T&G knew Friday that the Fattmans were settling the case with OCPF [the Office of Campaign and Political Finance] and sat on it until today? The Fattmans gave an exclusive ‘our side of the story’ in exchange for the T&G embargoing the interview?”

I asked the T&G’s executive editor, Michael McDermott, why his paper held the story. Here was his emailed answer:

We did have an interview with the Fattmans on Friday afternoon and a story was filed. I felt that what they said needed to be confirmed by the attorney general’s office, so I decided not to publish until we got that confirmation. It came on Tuesday morning. Once we got the confirmation, we published. I’m glad we waited because the attorney general provided significant additional context that would have otherwise been missing.

You know what? That’s a good answer. If the T&G had rushed to publish as soon as the interview with the Fattmans was over, it would have only had one side of the story. By waiting, the paper was able to include the attorney general’s official disposition of the case, which covered both Fattmans, other members of their family, and state and local Republican committees. It’s a complicated story, but the bottom line is that the Fattmans owe several hundred thousand dollars in compensation and fines.

Borondy’s article includes a statement from Campbell that said: “Enforcing our campaign finance laws, and holding those who violate them accountable, are critical functions of our office. We will continue to hold accountable those who misuse positions of power, break the law and undermine the public’s trust.”

And I give McDermott credit for resisting the urge to press the “publish” button before the T&G had a complete account.

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