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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

...no? I can't even imagine where you're getting that from. The NYT and Twitter/X are not even remotely competitors. One is full-length news articles from highly vetted/selected journalists, the other is short tweets from anyone and everyone.

Nobody's dropping their NYT subscription and replacing it with Twitter/X, conversely nobody's looking for the NYT to replace what they get from Twitter/X.

Saying they're in competition is like saying The Olive Garden restaurant chain competes with 7-Eleven convenience stores. Sure you can buy food at both of them, but they're not in competition. They're totally different categories.

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This is not remotely true.

Modern media like Twitter and Reddit and HN and (dare I say) 4chan is where news breaks first.

By the time I see it on the NYT Ive already read about it on numerous other platforms and usually with better information because its written by people firsthand on the scene or people directly in the know.

Information moves at lightspeed.

Literally dont read the NYT or WaPo anymore. I like that they exist for the abstract idea that quality journalism exists but practically never use them.

So yes Twitter is absolutely a competitor, due to its immediacy and its massive userbase.

Social media personalities aren't replacements for actual journalism. Tons of Twittermill journalism just ends up being dead wrong, misinformed, or missing a ton of key context.

>Tons of journalism just ends up being dead wrong, misinformed, or missing a ton of key context

FIFY

You could say any of these things about the NYT with a much higher degree of confidence. On Twitter, people are probably lying to me. NYT hacks are definitely lying to me.

It's not really lying. everyone views a subject differently.

so in order to get closer to the actual truth what you want is a massive variety of perspectives and opinions so one can actually synthesize this to get closer to the truth or at least a well-educated perspective on the subject.

which is what modern media gives to you.

versus the old guard who present things in a very specific way.

journalism is information.

whoever gets you that information faster wins

even the old news outlets try to out-compete each other for speed to press.

I personally think smart people are able to filter through a lot of information and synthesize the relevant.

it's also arguable that you get closer to the truth with the diversity of opinions about a subject on modern media and once again this is better for smart people to make up thier minds about something.

> whoever gets you that information faster wins

That's just not how it works.

Most people are more interested in accuracy, context, analysis, and trustworthiness.

Sure, papers very occasionally advertise that they were the first to break a story, but this is a minuscule proportion of everything they publish, and it's not the kind of thing that people switch subscriptions over.

If you're a day trader of stocks then speed is king. But for nearly everyone else, it's not the main metric.

> Most people are more interested in accuracy, context, analysis, and trustworthiness.

Lol imagine thinking you get this from big monopoly news media almost all of which are owned by private equity media conglomerates.

https://youtu.be/ksb3KD6DfSI?si=gc0FfF9WpdrKDmGW

You're proving my point.

NYT readers are interested in full articles and vetted analysis, not a bunch of scattered information from unknown sources, even if they're more immediate.

All you're saying is you don't like NYT/WaPo because you don't read quality journalism.

This is precisely my point. NYT competes with WaPo. Not with Twitter. If Twitter stopped existing, you still wouldn't go to the NYT. Because it's a totally different product category.

like the automobile was a different product category than the horse-drawn carriage?

No. Because if the automobile stopped existing, you'd go back to a horse and carriage. They did compete.

If Twitter implodes, people go to Threads/Mastodon/etc. They don't go to the NYT.

You're saying if one car company fails people will use another car company instead of going back to the horse and carriage

I'd agree with you on that

I know you're trying to imply that Twitter is more advanced than the NYT, but that's simply not true. They're different products for different audiences.

Revenue at the NYT has grown between 8% and 16% yearly each year over the past 3 years. That's simply not what happens to a business that is in decline or being replaced.

But go ahead, believe in your personal narrative all you want that somehow Twitter is replacing the NYT, despite all economic evidence and usage data to the contrary.

it is more advanced in the simple sense that you get much more varied information, perspectives and viewpoints.

i.e. its more difficult to advance a specific narrative or agenda by the private equity owners on millions of people versus a handful of reporters who have to obey their editors

If people go to Twitter for their acute information needs instead of newyorktimes.com, then they most definitely are competitors.

What you're doing is containing NYT in a niche category of "information for people who believe journalists product high quality information". In this niche, your point would stand true; someone who believes legacy journalism produces accurate and unbiased information is unlikely to even consider twitter.

For the larger mass, its simply not true, and the above niche market is a constantly shrinking one.

In fact, I would say that Twitter/X increases the demand for news, since that's what's shared and discussed on the platform. And vice versa: Reading about the latest outrages in the NYT gives the people something to tweet about. So each increases demand for the other. They're the frenemies who need each other more than they know.

While I agree in general and yes, they are not competitors in any way, I wouldn't say "nobody" for your examples. While still on Twitter I had a curated list of journalists and researchers which effectively was a newspaper replacement for me (for specific topics only).

>> from highly vetted/selected journalists,

Surely you jest.... You can not honesty believe that at this point with the number of factually challenged stories the NYT times has run over the last few year, which is not even accounting for their clearly partisan coverage in both "news" and opinion pieces.

I tend to agree twitter and NYT are not in competition, but I disagree that NYT is in any way more journalistic than twitter.

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