This article is part of The Poynter 50, a series reflecting on 50 moments and people that shaped journalism over the past half-century — and continue to influence its future. As Poynter celebrates its 50th anniversary, we examine how the media landscape has evolved and what it means for the next era of news.
The splash of a jet in the Hudson River. The late-night word that Osama bin Laden was dead. The shock of Whitney Houston’s passing.
Each broke first not on front pages or cable chyrons, but on Twitter, the social media platform now known as X. Founded in 2006, it quickly grew beyond a newsroom tool to rewire journalism and culture.
By 2012, scoops had become instant status symbols, and journalists became personalities, cultivating their own brands. In the process, the platform challenged — and sometimes shattered — generations of newsroom boundaries. It reshaped audience trust, reporters’ values and even who could call themselves a journalist in the first place.
In the early days, Twitter was a pleasant place to be. “It wasn’t such a loud conversation,” said Kate Conger, a San Francisco-based New York Times reporter who covers technology. People posted party invitations or what they ate for lunch. “Now if you go on Twitter, it feels like you’re talking to the entire world.”
Over time, Twitter evolved from being relatively intimate to being more public and, in some ways, performative. Journalists evolved along with it. Invitations and personal minutiae increasingly turned into breaking news and a focus on building up followings.
Before the internet, the biggest scoops were published on the newspaper’s front page. A1 stories are still important, but the internet meant news outlets didn’t have to wait until the following morning to publish a big story. Twitter changed the breaking news game even more, making speed the ultimate currency.
“If you weren’t first on Twitter, you weren’t first,” said Alecia Swasy, a journalism professor at Washington and Lee University who has studied Twitter’s impact on the media industry. “It became essential that you break the news first on Twitter.”
Boston Globe sports reporter Christopher Gasper learns of the New England Patriots first choice in the 2009 NFL Draft, Patrick Chung, a safety from Oregon, through the realpatriots twitter feed at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. Saturday April 25, 2009. Chung was the 34 pick overall in the second round of the draft. (AP Photo/Stew Milne)
But while Twitter accelerated journalism, it also clashed with newsroom priorities. Editors wanted big stories to break on their sites, behind their paywalls, and under their mastheads. Reporters wanted speed, visibility, and the credibility and acclaim that came with being first. That tug-of-war was transformative. In 2022, The New York Times even implored its journalists to spend less time posting on the platform. “Tweet less, tweet more thoughtfully, and devote more time to reporting,” Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s executive editor at the time, told Nieman Lab.
Nevertheless, audiences inevitably began to rely on Twitter in breaking news situations, like after a shooting or during a natural disaster, according to Shannon C. McGregor, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied Twitter for over a decade.
“You would find information about it on Twitter before other places,” McGregor said. Scoops have always been valued in journalism, but Twitter also gave journalists a platform to be more visible about them, McGregor added.
Twitter was also one of the first opportunities for journalists to show more of their own personality and develop a personal brand separate from their employer. And there was an incentive for journalists to cultivate “Twitter fame.” During this period, journalists sometimes got hired because of the following they had, according to McGregor.
“If you had a following on Twitter, you could parlay that into a significant promotion to a more prominent outlet,” she said. That may no longer be the case, but building a personal brand is still considered important in the industry.
The same qualities that made Twitter indispensable also made it fraught. Although Twitter gave reporters new ways to talk directly with their audiences, it also exposed journalists to increased online harassment. It also became host to a deluge of false information, which journalists had to learn to navigate as part of a changing media ecosystem.
Twitter also created echo chambers, according to Swasy. The platform was never representative of the entire world or even the entire United States, but the nature of the platform meant people eventually tuned into news sources and individuals whose perspective confirmed what they already thought. “There is a danger in that,” Swasy said. “You can’t use it as the all-knowing Oz.”
At Twitter’s peak, a blue check mark verifying your profile was a coveted status symbol that bestowed a degree of credibility and relevance on journalists. “It felt like there was some scarcity around it — that you had to reach some certain level of importance to be able to get it,” McGregor said.
Years ago, the tech news site TechCrunch had a deal with Twitter in which the outlet sent its reporters’ Twitter handles to a contact inside the social media company, and then they would be verified, according to Conger, who worked at the news site in 2016. “When I got hired at TechCrunch and found out about this, I remember being really excited, because I was like, ‘Oh, my account is going to get verified!’ And I was really excited when I finally got it,” Conger said. (TechCrunch did not reply to a request for comment.)
The value placed upon the blue check quickly shifted after Elon Musk purchased the platform in 2022 and users started having to pay for a blue check. Journalists and other users who didn’t want to pay slowly lost their check marks. Some who miraculously managed to keep theirs, at least for a brief time, sometimes posted messages of assurance that they had not paid for their blue check and weren’t sure why they still had it.
“It went from being a status symbol to something that you were embarrassed of, because no one wants to pay for their status. That’s not real status,” McGregor said. Former Gawker editor-in-chief Leah Finnegan agreed. “Now a blue check is like a scarlet letter,” she said.
Even though we’re unlikely to return to the Golden Age of Twitter, when blue checks were king, we’re also unlikely to return to what journalism was like before the platform existed.
