Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time. By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else. There are no incentives to improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance. Fact checking gets lost in the win…
Is the is very different to what newspapers were when they first appeared? Of course they never achieved the same technological pace. Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces. But even nowadays, there are plenty of crappy tabloids chasing ad revenue (clicks?), with no regard for information and only about the shock factor. And in…
This is a very unique perspective. It's one I don't share, and neither do the majority of Americans[1]. The economic and cultural forces shaping journalism make it so that it's vanishingly rare to find pieces that meet (my personal bar for) "considered, contextualized pieces". It's been a decade since the world of blogs/independent publishing has been an infinitely better source for that type of writing than traditional media has.
Naturally, independent publishing is also where you go to find the absolute worst of analysis and reporting, to a degree that traditional media would never stoop to. The core problem is that of discovery, finding the subset of high-quality sources in the acres of chaff that is the modern news environment.
It turns out that aggregators like Twitter are amazing for this, for those with the mental maturity and cognitive ability to use them with discipline. It's not very difficult to start with a trusted core of intellectually honest follows, then iteratively (and hyper-selectively) add high-quality accounts/author that you find through your existing follows. You have to be okay with a sparse feed to start, and you have to be disciplined enough to recognize perspectives that are high-quality even if you disagree with them, but it's an extremely straightforward path towards a much better media diet than the vast majority of people.
Note that this process doesn't disadvantage traditional media; it just fails to give it an undue advantage. Traditional publications and individual journalists within them can be treated like a source like any other, that can be compared to In practice, this is nominal only: in my experience, the incentives of the industry are such that 99% of them fall massively short of the basic quality and intellectual honesty bar. (Seriously, try it: start checking the sources and reading the papers cited by every article you read from eg the NYT and see how long you maintain confidence in modeling them as basically intelligent people telling you what's basically the truth).
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-di...