Twitter is a workspace

Senior journalists should be trying to make it better not worse

Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash

On Wednesday evening I was part of a panel at RMIT (with journalists Patricia Karvelas, Luke Henrique-Gomes, and Achol Arok) talking about journalism as a career and related matters. Of course, the topic of Twitter came up, though we didn’t really get into a nuts-and-bolts discussion of its role.

One of the questions we addressed was what the future of journalism looked like. We all agreed that it was important for journalists to develop deep knowledge in a particular area, to become genuinely expert in some field, and I thought it was interesting that we all raised this point.

The further point I made was that it was important to accept that journalism is now digital, not just in the sense that most of it happens online—in the fusion space of online media, as I called it in my last book—but in the sense that it changes the journalistic mindset: you have to stop thinking in terms of the organising logic of paper, with concepts like a “front page”, …