Jeremy Littau’s tweet storm on the news business goes viral

On January 24, 2019, my friend Jeremy Littau, a journalism professor at Leigh University, started a tweet storm of 30 or so posts that outlined an argument of why news media layoffs keep happening. Within half an hour I had read the entire thread and was absolutely blown away by his analysis. And so I shared the first post of the thread:

I also sent Jeremy a private message asking whether I he would be willing to give me a conventional text version of this essay to post on my blog. I didn’t want to let this great piece of writing slide into Twitter oblivion.

I needn’t have worried. As the day progressed Jeremy’s Tweet storm gathered attention.  He got positive mentions from NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen:

As well as a mention from the dean of Nevada political reporting, Jon, Ralston:

Within three days, Jeremy’s Twitter thread had attracted nearly 7 million impressions, 187,000 engagements, 18,000 retweets, and more than 1,200 replies. His follower count also jumped from about 3,000 to nearly 14,000.

 

 

 

Within the next few days, Dr. Littau had essays at Slate and Wired based on the ideas from his tweet thread.

So, what did Dr. Littau have to say on Twitter that got so much attention? You can read that in his guest post here at Living in a Media World.

This entry was posted in Chapter 10, Chapter 3, Chapter 6 and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.