No, journalism cannot be replaced by tweets

“Why do I feel most tech journalists tweet more and better content than they write in their articles?”

That was the question posed by Soroush Ghodsi, the teenage entrepreneur I profiled earlier in the year for The Next Web, yesterday.

It’s a valid one and certainly something I’ve touched on recently (See: Everything wrong with tech journalism — an ongoing list). But nonetheless, Soroush’s query rankled a little.

Here’s why:

I don’t want people to think of the world in terms of ‘content.’ Content is disposable. Content is created with a cynical bent or simply a practical one — more clicks = more eyeballs = more advertiser cash.

Obviously, The Malcontent and its parent company, The XX Corporation, exist to make money. The aim of t company is to be self-sufficient and pay writers, photographers and other creative people to make great stuff BUT there’s a good reason that The Malcontent is a bitter pun.

I don’t spend my life writing content. I write about things I care about, even if it leads people to despise me at times (okay, fairly often).

The problem with Soroush’s idea — fleshed out in later tweets — that most articles could be a series of tweets themselves is two-fold:

One — it would lead to a boiling out of nuance, wonder and skill 
Two — he’s right about a lot of the things published today

‘Articles’ balanced on the pure replication of tweets are not articles, they are aggregation, the barely legal theft that powers much of the modern media landscape. Similarly, many tech journalists — and journalists in general — do stretch thoughts that could be dashed off in 140 characters into thousands of words of invective.

Words matter. Ideas matter. The point of being a journalist and/or writer is to try to share stories and ideas in ways that are compelling enough to make them travel from your brain and fingers to many thousands or even millions of people.

To mangle Truman Capote’s memorable burn of Kerouac’s On The Road: There is writing and there is typing. Those who simply regurgitate tweets to compose their efforts are stenographers with smaller pay cheques.