This post was originally published on this site
Journalists view Twitter as a valuable platform for finding and sharing information, but many say they wish they used it less.
In late June, The New York Times published an article by Noam Scheiber detailing discomfort staffers at The Ringer feel about managers’ commitment to racial diversity and inclusion. K. Austin Collins, a former Ringer employee, was one of four Black journalists to detail his frustrations for the article, and the only one quoted.
Scheiber’s piece on the sports and culture media company surfaced amid a broader transformation currently taking place within the media industry, in which Black journalists and other journalists of color are sharing long-held frustrations around their experiences with racism embedded in the culture of their workplaces.
Much of that conversation has been playing out on Twitter, in impassioned threads and replies.
Collins, however, hasn’t been weighing in. He hasn’t tweeted since the start of the year, and he deleted his past tweets. He still uses the social media platform’s search function and maintains an anonymous private account to check in on Twitter controversies — but not often.
His decision to abandon Twitter, motivated by a long-simmering sense that it wasn’t compatible with his emotional and intellectual well-being, served him well after the piece came out, he said.
“I think if I’d been on Twitter, I’d have been much more inclined to put the things out there that I said to the reporter that didn’t make it into the article, and say my piece,” Collins
Read more here: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/a-growing-group-of-journalists-has-cut-back-on-twitter-or-abandoned-it-entirely/