Twitter doesn’t have to hire journalists to be a powerful media competitor

Twitter says it doesn’t have any interest in hiring reporters or performing other journalistic functions — but regardless of whether it does so, it is still a powerful media entity and one that grows stronger by the day.

When Twitter recently posted a job listing for a “head of news and journalism,” it sparked a rash of posts and commentary about how the company was becoming a media entity — until Twitter staffer Mark Luckie tossed cold water on that idea with an interview in which he pooh-poohed the notion that Twitter had any plans to be a media company. But Luckie’s response misses the point completely, which is that in every way that really matters, Twitter already is a powerful media entity. Depending on how you see the future of media, that is both good and bad.

There’s no question that some of the reaction to the company’s job posting has strained the bounds of credulity: media gadfly and failed media entrepreneur Michael Wolff, for example, wrote about how the person who became Twitter’s head of news and journalism would have a job “more important than Jeff Zucker’s at CNN,” one that would be like “running a network news division in the 1970s or 80s, the biggest job that there has ever been in news.” (from www.paidcontent.org)