On Twitter, every representative and senator is one click away from just about every reporter in the country, which can make them a force to be reckoned with - including those who are, on paper, several rungs above them in the congressional hierarchy. It’s a skill that can rescue from the wilderness the hundreds of rank-and-file members of Congress who might struggle to fill a press conference. Since the number of reporters on Twitter ballooned, that dynamic has become integrated into the way Capitol Hill, for its part, operates the good press secretary knows how to stuff a catchy quote into a tweet, pre-packaged to induce pick-up by political reporters. office, “it’s a very easy way to get the attention of much larger megaphones.” That’s helped usher in a new era in news media and a new era of Washington.Īs a result, says Nu Wexler, a former Senate staffer who from 2013 through 2017 was a policy communications official in Twitter’s D.C. It worked: Today, some 70 percent of journalists say Twitter is the social platform they use first- or second-most in their jobs. Twitter, in its struggle to grow its user base after it launched in 2006, actively cultivated reporters and other media figures and encouraged them to tweet, incentivizing them (at least in the pre-Musk days) in part through the sort of bulk-verification it otherwise gives to sports teams and talent agencies. That Twitter is soaked through with journalists isn’t accidental. If you’re trying to reach Americans, says one Senate Democratic staffer, “one way is to spend a million dollars on TV ads.” Another way, says the aide, is to “talk to the people who talk to people” - that is, reporters. Talk to just about anyone in politics, and they make plain that one of Twitter’s key uses is simply getting themselves, their boss, their issue in front of a powerful audience: the press. How often do you see tweets in the pages of POLITICO? So why, exactly, can’t Washington quit Twitter? They talked about how Twitter has become essential to how they do their jobs, and why the end of the social network would trigger upheaval in the capital. I spoke with more than 15 insiders from all walks of Washington who spoke about how Twitter’s become baked in to their lives. Any replacement will struggle to replicate all the ways it has transformed the city. But for now, it’s still the place for reporter-massaging, idea-debating, networking, rumor-mill-monitoring and career-building. Sure, folks in Washington might well give up on Twitter.
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