Twitter: Great for news consumption

As someone who has grown up and come to age with social media, it is no surprise that using a social media platform is how I primarily consume my news online. It may sound oversimplified, but the truth of the matter is that Twitter — the main social media platform I use — is a great tool for accessing and being made aware of various news and news articles. While this can also make it easier to get goaded into “fake” news stories, it only takes a few seconds to check the source you are reading and its credibility.

On Twitter I follow many journalists and news organizations, which is how I commonly consume the news and read these pieces. The journalists and news publications I follow are both local and national. Twitter also has its “homepage” and trending feature, which are both great for finding out breaking news stories and what is happening up to the minute all over the world.

Of course, I also occasionally just go directly to news sites, like The New York Times and Syracuse.com. I used to do this more often before I started using Twitter on a regular basis a few years ago. But with how easy and simple it is to get news and even directly follow the writers, Twitter has become the way I consume my news online. This may be more of a “millennial” thing, but I honestly do find Twitter to be a great tool for getting constant access to all kinds of news snippets and stories at the push of a finger.

The devices I use to gain access to online news is mainly my phone, unless I’m at school and already on a computer. I find it much quicker, easier and user-friendly to go on the Twitter app on my phone than boot up my old, slow computer and use Twitter there or go to the news sites themselves.

Now, alluding to Twitter once again, this is almost always how I find news stories. When reporters or writers tweet out news snippets of news story links while I’m on Twitter, I go through the ones I find the most shocking, interesting or impactful (not always chronologically) and read them at my own pace.

Doing this assignment I’ve learned how much I rarely even visit news sites directly; I just click on links in tweets from writers themselves that take me to the sites. It feels odd to say that I don’t usually visit news sites directly being that I’m a journalist, but it actually has been the case since I started using Twitter on a regular basis a few years ago. In the event that I’m already on a computer and go to a news site, I commonly get attracted to different stories depending on how catchy a headlines is and/or any images associated with a story — a car crash photo, for instance. When really thinking about it, sometimes I don’t even read full articles; I read the first few paragraphs, and depending on how interesting or impactful the story is, I decide whether to read on or look for another article. This is what is also great about using Twitter as a source for news: reporters and writers tweet out news, say, as they’re covering an event or finding out more about something, making it simple to get the basics quickly instead of having to read a whole article.