Is that how you see yourself—as a newsfluencer?
I’m a journalist first, but there are people who fall under that category. Influencers aren’t a bad thing, necessarily. I know there’s a lot of debate around it. But there are people who have leaned into the news as part of their brand and what they do. People thought that’s what I was. I actually found out that a lot of people didn’t even know that I was a journalist until relatively recently. They thought I was, and this is a quote, “Some dude sharing news stories online.”
For the longest time I thought you were a bot.
A lot of people thought I was a bot. Or that I was just scheduling posts. And now I feel I can’t change my profile picture. People might think I got hacked.
Is the attention economy so fucked now beyond the point of saving that it’s impossible to break through the chatter in a meaningful way?
When you think about it, we’re competing with Instagram aggregators, blogs, social media pages focused solely on news, podcasts—it’s all over the place. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. If it wasn’t for social media, I would not have been able to take the path I did. We are in a crisis of attention, but what I find more frightening is the rise of misinformation and disinformation. That’s more chilling to me than the amount of people who want to do the best work that they can, whether that’s on YouTube or TikTok. There’s more than enough happening out there for us all to get a piece or whatever.
True.
I’m more concerned about the bad actors who are going after people who may not be reading the link. They might just be reading the headline, right? They might just be looking at the post with the black font that says, hey, this is what’s happening on Instagram, and that’s it.
Because the state of news media has gotten so splintered, is this why you do what you do?
I want to be able to be a resource for people online as far as getting them the information that they need. I mean, I love when people come up to me and they’re like, “Hey, you know, I found out about this through you.” I love hearing that because I do think there’s so much out there that there’s an equal amount of things that are being missed or underreported or that maybe people aren’t paying attention to.
The reach you have is pretty incredible.
What I like most about whenever I’m sharing a story, I know that it’s not just readers who are at work who, you know, just opened up their phone and were like, “Oh wow, I found out about this story.” It’s also assignment editors who follow me. People at The New York Times, at CNN—
—at BuzzFeed. I bet they regret rejecting you now [laughs].
It’s funny because people will tell me, “Hey, we shared your tweet in our newsroom Slack channel. That’s how we found out about the story, and now we’re going to write about it.” So you don’t have to have millions of followers, but I have a reach that’s a little different. And that’s important to me.
It should be.
That’s not to say I always get everything right. I always tell people, journalists get things wrong. We issue corrections. We try our best to do what we can. But what’s most important to me is making sure that the stories that I think people need to know about or need to read about, I try to get them out there—and apparently my Twitter page is the best way to do it.
