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How Twitter changed the face of journalism for ever

I’ve watched the social media platform revolutionise the industry – and quickly lose its innocence in the process

John Rentoul
Sunday 02 February 2020 01:12 GMT
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Journalism has been made more transparent, in that anyone with the internet can see what journalists are up to
Journalism has been made more transparent, in that anyone with the internet can see what journalists are up to

One of the luckiest breaks in my career was when Larry Ryan, who was in charge of expanding The Independent’s website, put me on Twitter in its early days in 2008. The Independent had set up a number of blogs, to take advantage of the freedoms of the online world, and I enjoyed the new form of opinion journalism.

Larry set up an automatic feed from my blog to Twitter, so to start with my tweets consisted of the headline of the blogpost and a link. It wasn’t until I bumped into Liam Byrne, who was a minister about to be promoted to the Labour cabinet, and he said he enjoyed my “cryptic” tweets, that I thought there might be something in it.

Thus I was in at the start of the Twitter revolution that was about to transform journalism. Within a year or two, most journalists were on Twitter and it was the main way they talked to each other, and the primary way that news was spread.

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