I hate Twitter and agree with much of what Maggie says about it. I envy anyone the luxury of dialing back on their Twitter use. I can't yet, as I'm a digital journalist covering a crisis and key MSM journalists like Maggie routinely get leads/ideas off Twitter—whatever they say.
2/ The top investigative reporter for POLITICO told me so many mainstream outlets get so many of their leads/ideas from social media that they can't ever cite the information they're taking, lest every sentence of their articles be followed by reference to someone's Twitter feed.
3/ So my *main* objection to what Maggie wrote in The New York Times is that she's pretending that mainstream journalists primarily use social media to converse, when in fact she knows (and I know and all mainstream journalists know) they use it primarily for *story development*.
4/ As a result, the effect of Maggie *correctly* saying that Twitter isn't a good place for conversation—but doing so in a way that denies its other uses for journalists—is to denigrate the work of the independent digital journalists mainstream journalists increasingly rely upon.
5/ I wouldn't disagree with anyone—including Maggie—who says there are aspects of how Twitter's set up that encourage nastiness. What I *can't* trace to Twitter is the lack of gratitude mainstream journalists show to those whose work on Twitter they secretly find invaluable. /end
