How does the media love Twitter? Let us count the ways: as a tech platform practically indispensable to the work of newsgathering; as a metrics system designating clear numerical value to once-squishy concepts of popularity and esteem; as a gossip-fueled lunchroom of the elites more or less available for public participation; as an arena for duking out industry controversies ranging from #MeToo to opinions about opinion pages. Twitter is the central stage for the drama of our digital media age, and the relationship media workers have cultivated with it over the past 16 years is as uneasy as it is obsessive: Every other news cycle, when any particular quake related to someone saying something stupid or disagreeable or out of touch or oftentimes simply oversharey occurs, it triggers a recurrent tsunami of contemplation of why any of us in the industry are on the hellsite at all. Last week, The New York Times issued a memo about a “Twitter reset” that practically begged its own journalists to log off.
Yet the compulsion to tend to the big blue bird is understandable, perhaps essential: Under the guise of being “online” and capable of disseminating news instantaneously (known colloquially as “retweeting”), being active on Twitter, for media workers, gives the effect of fulfilling one’s occupational duty as well as all the parts of professional upkeep that, in the physical world, involve being in the right rooms, overhearing the right things, and more or less maintaining appearances. (Just ask Twitter super user and owner of multiple corporations Elon Musk, who is so enamored and repulsed with the platform that he launched a hostile takeover bid for it on Thursday. For $43 billion, he said, he will unlock its “extraordinary potential.”) Factor in the predisposition for the media industry to be gabby, anxious validation-seekers (Choire Sicha’s words, not mine), and the relentless chatter, ranging from the insightful to the inane, all makes sense. In the already existing metaverse, it’s our chief hangout. To ask your newsroom employees to quit the habit, in a sense, is to misunderstand the plight of the modern (online) journalist, where entire careers are predicated on publicly blurring the professional and personal selves.
There’s a new show on Apple TV+—perhaps you saw media types tweeting about it?—called Severance that I’ve been thinking about in light of the latest angst roused by that Times memo. Unlike your typical office drama, wherein characters’ lives intersect entertainingly both inside and outside work, the premise of Severance rests in the twisted implications of total compartmentalization: What if you could separate out your work memories (and thereby your work self), thereby forming a totally distinct identity while on the job? One can easily imagine how those belonging to the ivory tower school of objectivity would secretly thrill to this concept: a “severed” journalist, unblemished by personality or lived experience, might well be the platonic ideal of the profession.
And for the brief window of time in which the web was used primarily as a business tool for maximum efficiency, this may have been the kind of existence we led when the news industry moved online. But as it turned out, our full-scale enmeshment with the internet has tilted much more personal. The formula for amassing an audience that would ostensibly click on your articles or buy your books or trust your judgment has become a matter of appearing likable at scale, or at least gesturing toward your status as a fellow human. Cue the internet of relatability, of which the earliest artifacts of the era have come to haunt us in the form of Gen Z TikToks asking why every millennial Twitter bio is some version of “Author. Sloppy Joe Enthusiast. World Cup Watcher. Mother.” Don’t worry, we kind of hated it, too.
What mires the long-running debate about whether journalists should be influencers, or brands, or whatever you want to call a journalist a unit of commodified reputation, is that anyone online professionally understands there is a magical, unknowable ratio of “work self” versus “personal self” that, once perfected, can alchemize into tangible payoff. (See: anyone you know who got a start by blogging, tweeting, or newslettering into institutional notice.) For media workers, especially those at the start of their careers, it quite literally pays to be visible and visibly liked on Twitter, and posting about your dog alongside analyses of the supply chain, or perhaps a buzzy TV show, is a reliable way to achieve likability, whether you’re conscious of it or not. When I was in journalism school, I had a professor who dedicated a specific day in class to teach us how to use Twitter. The professor went as far as to remind us that being pleasantly relatable (liked) online was a crucial way to meet sources. Never mind that as soon as us college students became unleashed on the platform, we immediately began shitposting, subtweeting, and oversharing. Even then, we knew. This was 2012.
When journalists say someone’s “very good at Twitter,” we’re talking about the way that person strikes that mystical perfect balance between the personal and the professional self online. It isn’t a coincidence that it’s usually those Twitter superstars who tend to be gainfully employed at national titles; it also isn’t a coincidence that those who’ve achieved (media) fame are the ones who can opt out of Twitter entirely. They don’t need it anymore (but if you have a lead on D**** R******’s burner account, please DM).
The problem, of course, is that for everyone else, finding and maintaining that balance is a fool’s errand. Keep things too by the book, and lose out on the relatability payoff. Get too big—embody too much of your “personal” self versus the self strictly defined by workplace social media guidelines—and you find yourself beached by the friendly neighborhood algorithm at a precipitous height, subject to a deluge of envy, mockery, or harassment (for women, LGBTQ, and BIPOC media workers, of course, to exist at all is usually already to be “too much”). Opt out entirely, sans the security of a cushy contract or established name, and you know you’re missing connections and conversation you may truly need on the job.
It’s telling that, in an interview last week conducted in response to the Twitter reset memo, Times executive editor Dean Baquet expressed his frustration in terms of the mythical personal versus professional balance, as if worried we may forget which end of the ratio reigns supreme. “It eats up too much time,” he said of Twitter. “There are journalists, at The New York Times and elsewhere, who tweet many, many, many, many, many times a day. Some people tweet about the minutiae of their lives. To me, that’s time not spent actually reporting.”
The workers in Severance, at least, get to go home at the end of the day. Online, you never leave.
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