Blatantly false, as the childish histrionics over the new verification system from many journalists this past week have shown. A lot of journalists' entire self worth seems wrapped up in their twitter audience frankly.
Not a journalist. And he definitely doesn't have his self worth tied up into his Twitter audience.
But anyways, by your logic, the entire HN audience's self worth is tied up in whether an iPhone has an audio jack or not, because this audience spent way more time and energy on that issue than journalists have on the blue checkmark.
I’ve seen a lot of “hey you just got your spurs” back slapping when someone gets a check.
In any case my opinion is that a lot of journalists (at least the active ones, not the ones with auto-tweets of their stories) really enjoy twitter and really enjoy being "a blue checkmark" and are annoyed that their club is no longer exclusive. This annoyance has been verbalized in a myriad of criticisms of musk, the new system, etc.
Edit: because I can’t completely punt I did remember seeing this tweet which amazingly has 85k likes https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1587508595553353729
Which blew my mind, oh course not completely representative of all journalists
I'll believe that one when I see it; feels very much like celebs announcing they're moving to Canada.
More broadly, I think the original tweet thread picks up on something interesting: that blue-check group is bifurcated into actual-clout-havers, e.g. Steven King, who really could/would walk away, and epsilon-from-irrelevant journos who have it as a facet of their employment, who really couldn't. There's a small overlap of journos-with-actual-clout, but they're the exception.
Low-clout journos are riding on the cachet generated by the other group, and benefit more from Twitter than they contribute. This is obviously anecdotal so I can't cite or anything, but in conversations with non-tech people IRL I tend to notice a stack of assumptions: Steven King == blue check == important =?= rando journalist =?= also important? If you're a reporter in Columbus, OH or whatever, the effectiveness of that platform, handed to you by the Twitter gods, vastly outstrips your "actual" impact.
Steven King doesn't care. Journalist who wants to believe they're a member of the same club as Steven King definitely cares.
Really? You think journalists want to be in the same club as Stephen King? Because they both happen to write?
I'll believe that when journalists stop writing articles with unnamed sources, that are based on random twitter posts.
A good barometer for journos integrity, i suppose. As far as i can tell, the better ones just want a voice and a platform, others like click-baiting and self-validating checkmarks.