Media maven James Fallows sees Twitter dying, and alternatives bubbling up from local online publishers

Elon Musk’s takeover of the Great Library of Alexandria. No, not really.
A 19th century painting of a Julius Caesar-era event, via Getty Images.

You may have never used Twitter or care about its future, but 23 percent of Americans do use it, and they tend to be people active in the public life of our nation and its communities: journalists, politicians and others in government, for example. James Fallows, who understands the media landscape from the bottom up, the top down and side to side, suggests the answers to “How can media serve the public interest?” may come from the bottom up.

Fallows' latest piece on Substack is prompted by Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter and successive moves that "seemed childish, willful, heartless and destructive, and seemed to reveal how little he grasps the difference between running a media organization and running an electric-car or rocket-ship firm. It’s like a rich football fan buying an NFL team and imagining that he can name draft picks and call plays." So, Fallows has lost hope in Twitter, which he has valued as "a source of information and . . . connections you might not have developed in other ways, a real-time sensory network for breaking news. . . . I’ve gained much, much more from Twitter—in connections, suggestions, insights—than I’ve lost, via friction or frittering. This is what’s going away."
Fallows isn't sure when or why that will happen: "I think most will try to hang on, until the water backing up behind the dam becomes too deep. Will that moment come because of trolling? More vitriol and hate speech? Reputational queasiness about using this platform and being associated with Musk? I don’t know. When it happens, there will be a range of new habitats." He names several, and links to another list, "but there won’t be any one convenient place. If there were, people would already have moved."

Fallows concludes, "for the media, the challenge is beginning the slow, hard work of creating something different and new. If there were 'an' answer to this problem, someone would already have suggested it. Instead — as with Twitter alternatives, but on a broader and more consequential scale — there will have to be many, and we’ll blunder and feel our way forward.

Highlighting, connecting, and trying to support this diverse “many” is one of my ongoing ambitions in this space. For the moment I’ll mention just one of the my: LION Publishers, for Local Independent Online News. This is where the future of news is being invented, city by city, one revenue-and-engagement model at a time. These are the kind of entrepreneurs who deserve more attention. They — we — will be the ones to clean up the mess that careless people have made."

The latest round of LION awards shows the potential of such newsrooms, Joshua Benton writes for NiemanLab.