RIP, “X.”
Count Cascadia Daily News among the many news organizations that will cease actively posting on the Elon Musk-controlled social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
It’s a decision we have been mulling for a long time, accelerated by Musk’s takeover of the once-revolutionary, breaking-news-geared social platform that transformed — for better or worse — the way one segment of Planet Earth has kibbitzed with itself and shared news headlines for the past decade and a half.
That’s a long run for Twitter/X, or any other such service, in the rapidly evolving world of digital info-sharing. And it’s an important object lesson in how far south, and how quickly, such a service can go with change of ownership.
We’re moving away from X for the same reasons as many other newsrooms: Its negatives have overwhelmed its usefulness. We will concentrate our efforts elsewhere.
Once a useful tool to communicate with the public and share our work, X is increasingly a toxic environment, riddled with fake identities and increasingly shaped to serve the commercial and undeniable political interests of its owner.
Whether or not Musk’s X platform eventually merges, as some suspect, with President-elect Donald Trump’s Truth Social to form a monolithic propaganda arm is largely irrelevant: It’s already become a swamp in which I, both as CDN’s editor and a news consumer, am finished wading.
With its former verifications and fact-checking standards flushed by Musk, X has become a breeding ground for misinformation, contrary to the very principles upon which your local newspaper was founded. CDN remains “unapologetically pro-democracy.” The ownership of X seems not to share that value.
Ownership has consequences
It’s not about “balance.” Musk has demonstrably used a service that’s now another personal plaything to attempt to shape political discourse by stifling legitimate journalism and amplifying alternate-reality sources. His dropping of former account-verification guardrails has given new life to posters, foreign and domestic, of racist, misogynist and antisemitic propaganda. That has turned what once was a spirited Twitter chat platform into a factory spewing what amounts to digital pink slime.
“There is something deeply wrong with X, a platform once beloved by journalists when its logo was a cheery bluebird, and you could quickly tell who was a real journalist or expert,” Rob Tornoe opined this week in the trade publication Editor & Publisher. “Now, with users able to pay $8 a month for their own checkmark, the site has become borderline unusable for a group that had been among its most devoted addicts.”
Hear, hear. Life is too short to flounder in that offal.
We’ll leave CDN’s previous content there, and keep the account name intact as a placeholder, for now. But we’ll be moving our postings elsewhere.
Individual CDN journalists, including myself, have maintained accounts there for the time being, mostly for reporting purposes; our staff as always is free to post on and monitor whatever social outlets they prefer.
While that process plays out, we’ll continue to post regularly on Facebook and Instagram, and share videos on CDN’s YouTube channel.
Rethinking social posts
The timing is good. CDN’s newsroom was already reconsidering its social media policies, mulling not just where we post our work and engage with the public, but how, when — and increasingly why.
Dropping X as part of our active plan is step one. Next will be experimenting with other digital tools to bring our readers breaking, quick-headline news once announced on Twitter/X. That’s likely to include some other systems we haven’t broadly employed, such as text alerts, and more frequent breaking-news email bulletins for readers who want them.
We’re also giving a trial run to the social platform and emerging media-world X-replacement, Bluesky, where many X-patriates have gathered. Some of us already have a toe in those waters. So far we like what we see in terms of tools, tone and adaptability. You can follow CDN there beginning today.
Our content there, and on other platforms, will soon take on a new look. Look for two short-term changes:
Frequency
We’ll no longer post to social media everything we publish on cascadiadaily.com. We’ve been doing that since our 2022 inception mostly to get the growing work of CDN, a startup news organization, noticed in the eyes of the public and the media world.
We feel like that goal has been met; most active news watchers in our region know who we are — and where to find us. But the volume of our daily work in the past year and a half has likely doubled, risking oversaturation if posted in its entirety on social channels.
We want readers to know that what we post there is our most impactful material, worthy of their valuable time.
Additional context
In that spirit, we’ll post more of that work with what I consider “value-added” descriptions, beyond just a headline and link. This will include brief contextual material of various types: backstories, previous CDN work that laid the groundwork for an update; connections to a broader national or regional issue; sometimes even personal thoughts from our journalists about how and why they did the work.
In short: We want to add context to what we’re posting, answering for readers (and frankly ourselves) the critical question in this age of info-overload: Why does this matter?
We also, of course, continue to value social media as a portal to communicate directly with you, our readers. We hope the changes we’re making now, into the future, will make that a better experience for everyone. Please feel free to pass along your thoughts to us on those social channels, or to me at the email address below. Our inboxes are always open.
Ron Judd's column appears weekly; ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com; @roncjudd.
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