My employer, the Mountain Xpress, announced a bold move today, becoming the country's first all-Twitter newspaper:The Mountain Xpress, Asheville, N.C.’s, alternative newsweekly, took a remarkable step on Wednesday, ending its 14-year run as a print publication (today’s issue is our last), suspending its regular online news reports and converting its entire news operation to Twitter dispatches from staff and trusted community journalists.
Here at Mountain Xpress, we find ourselves facing unprecedented change. Like many of you, we’re battling a contracting economy that’s forcing us to work smarter, faster, smaller. Meanwhile, digital tools offering new ways of engaging readers seem to land in our inboxes daily. And the astonishing growth and spread of mobile users and social networking capabilities is delivering new news faster than we can even begin to figure out what the old news was.
In other words, news outlets no longer control the flow of information. Quite simply, the tools have left the building.
But that doesn’t mean we’re throwing in the virtual towel. We at Xpress feel strongly that there’s still an important role for journalists in this society. And as a truth-seeking filter, an ever-vigilant watchdog and a community meeting place for diverse thoughts and ideas, we wholeheartedly believe that the newspaper will continue to play a crucial role in our democracy, even if it no longer offers either “news” or “paper” in the conventional sense.
Things are changing, and Xpress has decided not only to embrace that change but to charge ahead in a manner befitting the creativity and edge that make Asheville the continually shifting center point it undoubtedly is.
A video manifesto from our publisher Jeff Fobes (who is awesome, but quite mad), follows:
I, for one, have long ago adapted my writing to a masterful, haiku-like brevity, and welcome our Tweeted-out future.
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