As the new year sets in I think again of making more active use of social media rather than just treating it as a news source, which my work as a journalist entails.

The problem is that I don’t quite know what to post let alone where.

For more than a year I have been working in the London newsroom solely as a digital news editor, specifically a night (GMT) editor, most of the time in World news, occasionally covering the UK (ooh that by-election result buzz). While I love the work (I offer the heavy parts up for my many sins) I have little to show for it. What is there to say, really, about keeping the news seam invisible? It is demanding, intense work that leaves no space for sharing on social media. My “sharing” in work hours is basically sending out BBC push notifications to the world and possibly the occasional breaking news tweet.

Outside work I still have the odd bit of content I want to share which mainly comes down to things that interest me on my travels, modest as they may be. In September I spent a week holidaying in eastern France and wrote, for instance, this private account of my trip over from England and experience of a street opera: My Saturday with the salamanders. But where do I share?

Twitter was my obvious medium of choice as a journalist but since it became X it is more birdcage than bird in my experience. For some reason the algorithm strangles my posts. I suspect it has nothing to do with lack of subscription and is probably down to factors like muting (I imagine I annoyed a few people back in 2022 by tweeting that the number one priority regarding the new war in Europe was to keep it contained because any direct fight between Nato and Russia would spell the end of all of us – that is still my personal conviction). In any case, my X account may as well be locked as open for all the circulation my posts get. I am ready to try other social media but lost interest when my attempt at a Threads account failed to get any traction.

My main issue with X is the algorithm which butchers the tweeting experience – don’t you love AI, people? Almost as bad, however, is the way the sewer which always ran just underneath – out of sight until, for instance, you searched for #Lesbos for a migration crisis story and came up with porn – now contaminates the stream. At one point I got to hate the churn of pub bore rubbish and snuff videos so much that I began deleting my timeline, not wanting to be associated with Zombie Twitter (I stopped at 2019, remembering there were published BBC stories linking to some of my tweets in the preceding years such as a Moment on election time in a French no-go zone).

My workaround for now is to post more on my actual blog, here on WordPress, and share links to Twitter and Facebook. Hopefully you won’t find anything resembling a political opinion and may actually like some of the stuff I write or film.