Is there a canonical essay about (the problems with and complexities of) social media aggregation as journalism that I can just link to so I don't have to break down the angles and weirdnesses myself?
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@kissane are you talking about aggregation on a personal level, like when I bring my Instagram, Reddit and WordPress feeds all into Twitter?
Or aggregation like when two or three big companies keep buying up the new startups?
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@evan Oh no, I mean when journalists collect up a bunch of e.g. tweets and post them with a couple of paragraphs and call it a story. (Really I mean when editors assign this kind of story.)
"Aggregate" is just how I've heard it talked about within journalism.
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one of you just sent a lead and then deleted it before I could track it down please come back I promise to be nice(r than I was on twitter)
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@kissane Are you talking about those horrible "Social media reacts to" stories?
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@Researchbuzz Yeah, really the whole spectrum of platform-news org entanglement. But especially those.
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A couple of leads focused on the fake accounts aspect https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/more-bogus-embedded-tweets-in-our-stories/ and https://www.cgai.ca/inthemediaapril62018
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@jwz Eh, I mean everyone hates the worst examples but there’s a whole spectrum. Covering non-celebrity social media fights is standard practice now, if the fights are zingy or stupid enough. And for years now we’ve had the professionals driving news cycles from Twitter. Deeply weird on a structural level.
So like…call it whatever, but it merits some careful attention as a phenomenon, I think.
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@kissane You’re probably looking for a more nuanced take than “everything is going to shit, and what we used to call journalism is leading the way “, right?
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@slothrop I think I’m looking for a description of what happened and when, so probably disappointingly un-takey