Amanda ☕️🍂Feb 8, 2023
robinsonmeyer

Was talking to a reporter yesterday about how to learn the climate beat and realized I couldn’t confidently recommend that she do what I did anymore — follow a bunch of prospective sources, experts, and analysts on Twitter and try to understand the networks between them.

Between Twitter’s decay and the AI-ification of search engines, I’m not sure anyone is ready for how much the core mechanisms of primary-source discovery on the web could be about to degrade.

Feb 8, 2023 at 2:47pmWeb
Show threadAndy ThomasonFeb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer And it was already bad! I've been surprised at how much more effective it is to start a research project by buying a relevant scholarly book and tracing the citations than it is to try to Google your way to answers. Sounds kinda obvious when you type it out but the analog approach is hard to beat.
Show threadPeggy Heinkel-WolfeFeb 8, 2023

@andy @robinsonmeyer

This combing-a-bibliography strategy has always been the best way.

Show threadArneBabFeb 13, 2023

@andy It should not be more efficient to follow analog traces — if funding the web worked.

I think the reason why analog works better is that it is mostly done by established publishers who have a reputation to loose (which would risk their very existence) if they publish bullshit. @robinsonmeyer

Show threadJenny ChaseFeb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer that's something that terrifies me about AI, too. It removes a rung of "cover basic stories from press releases" from a possible career.
Show threadDomestic Supply Feb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer The standards for evidence in science, law or history are all far better than the standards most people use to vet what they share online. Encouraging people to treat the output of AI chatbots as their own words will make it worse. Erasing the extra caveat of stating, "I heard that ..." will result it traceability to primary sources will be laundered through AI and humans not attributing it as a source.
Show threadExtinction (our fate)Feb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer Twitter as a networking opportunity may be gone, but the primary sources are still out there online and elsewhere. Scientists, activists, politicians and the impacted citizens and institutions haven't physically moved. Surely there's a better entry point for budding reporters than Twitter ever was.
Show threadChris Nelder 🤘Feb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer Agreed. But that's why we produced the @TransitionShow Energy Basics miniseries https://xenetwork.org/ets/category/energy-basics/?view=episode&order=desc&orderby=air_date&display=list and Climate Science miniseries https://xenetwork.org/ets/category/climate-science-miniseries/?view=episode&order=desc&orderby=air_date&display=list
They're highly structured and a great way to study up and get up to speed. Much faster than mining Twitter, actually.
Energy Basics Archives | The Energy Transition Show

The Energy Transition Show
Show threadrobinsonmeyerFeb 8, 2023
@chrisnelder I’ll point her to them! But also my point was about more than just climate alone — it’s the real-life networks that Twitter once let reporters peer into that are now going dark.
Show threadChris Nelder 🤘Feb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer Yes, well, frankly, that's on all of them. It's been obvious for months that it would be far better for everyone if they all just migrated over here. Hopefully they'll come to their senses soon and start rebuilding their networks here. It would only take a few weeks if they just got off their lazy asses and did it. Maybe now they will...
Show threadSean OFeb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer Sounds like a job for a librarian.
Show threadJJ PetersonFeb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer Tell the next reporter who asks to report the historic, unprecedented steps this administration is taking to convert the US grid to renewables and the tens of billions finally being spent on that many other climate initiatives. Few Twitter climate journos report the successes, I guess that’s too much work or doesn’t fit the “don’t look up” narrative the far left is attached to. So there’s a place to start.
Show threadCameron MacLeodFeb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer @navalang All of my public transit advocacy stemmed from my learning on Twitter. Many sources have moved to Mastodon accounts, but similarly the primary source distribution paths for unbiased info are all falling apart.
Show threadSharon MachlisFeb 8, 2023
@robinsonmeyer I'm not sure that's all bad. I can't speak to climate specifically, but Twitter was always an unrepresentative sample of "experts" in quite a few fields.
Show threadHistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴Feb 10, 2023

@robinsonmeyer

Exactly:

https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/109835496236096193

Show threadRichardFeb 12, 2023
@robinsonmeyer Over-reliance on Twitter has been a terrible problem in journalism for the past decade. It has definitely had a place as a useful tool, but there have been too many reporters churning out stories entirely based on scraping twitter posts and conversations.
Show threadAndreas KFeb 13, 2023

@robinsonmeyer “primary source discovery” isn't that what one does by researching scientific databases and reading scientific articles?

Ok, Google Scholar is useful.

Scientists used to post stuff on Twitter, BUT OMG, realistically only a tiny subset of them.