The Verge: “Here is a very dumb truth: for a decade, the default answer to nearly every problem in mass media communication involved Twitter. Breaking news? Twitter. Live sports commentary? Twitter. Politics? Twitter. A celebrity has behaved badly? Twitter. A celebrity has issued a Notes app apology for bad behavior? Twitter. For a good while, the most reliable way to find out what a loud noise in New York City was involved asking Twitter. Was there an earthquake in San Francisco? Twitter. Is some website down? Twitter. The sense that Twitter was a real-time news feed worked in both directions: people went on Twitter to find out what was going on, and reporters, seeing a real-time audience of people paying attention to news, started talking directly to those people. Twitter knew this and played right into it. In 2009, co-founder Biz Stone wrote that the platform had become a “new kind of information network” and that the prompt in the tweet box would now be, “What’s happening?”  “Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about,” he wrote. In short, Twitter was for the news…

reporters around the world provided Twitter with real-time news and commentary for free, increasingly learning to shape stories for the algorithm instead of their actual readers. Meanwhile, the media companies they worked for faced an exodus of their biggest advertising clients to social platforms with better, more integrated ad products, a direct connection to audiences, and no pesky editorial ethics policies. The news became ever smaller, even as the stories got bigger — there are would-be reporters in every part of the country and world posting for free, even as the local news business itself dries up. Twitter was founded in 2006. Since that year, newspaper employment has fallen 70 percent, and people in more than half of the counties in America have little to no local news at all…”