In the heyday of Twitter from the late 2000s through the late 2010s, many of the top voices in media and journalism grew their followings and audiences on the popular social media platform. In sports, one of the best examples is Bomani Jones, who had an untraditional route through blogs and radio before ultimately landing at ESPN.
Jones has more than 530,000 followers on Twitter (now X), but now hardly spends any time on the platform. In a recent appearance on The Press Box podcast, Jones explained that he now essentially views X as a ghost town. With every social media app migrating to an algorithm-based feed that pushes aggregator accounts and video clips over original work, Jones doesn’t believe it is possible for up-and-comers in media today to build a career through any social media platform, let alone on the bot-fueled X.
“I don’t have any evidence that you can truly build a brand through social media now like I did 15 years ago,” Jones said on The Press Box.
“Truth be told, with the ‘For You’ tabs and things like that, it sends you stuff to occupy you, and that’s all they’re trying to do, is occupy you. So it gives you enough there to occupy [yourself]. I don’t know if you can use social media to build [your brand] any differently than the idea of, you need to go get a job, and then you write stuff, and then the stuff you put on social media then goes around. But I don’t know the last time I came across somebody new and young.”
Later, Jones referenced Diante Lee, an NFL analyst at The Ringer, as one recent example of a young commentator he found through X. But overall, Jones said that the platforms make it far too hard these days to sort through the content intended to “occupy” users to actually find engaging content and sharp new voices.
When asked how he would advise young journalists about using social media now, Jones said to focus on the work rather than the promotion.
“My recommendation to young people is, how about you get good at your stuff?” Jones said. “And the reality is, other people are going to be the ones to bounce it around. I don’t know how much it’s going to have to do with you.”
As an example, Jones noted that even top hosts like Stephen A. Smith tend to repost clips from aggregator accounts almost as often as they post their own work. Many websites and social accounts make money from finding and amplifying notable commentary from media voices.
It is largely a waste of time, Jones argued, to waste time with the low-return work of throwing darts at an unreliable algorithm rather than plugging into a content machine that allows you to hone your craft and get attention organically.
“My point is not that you shouldn’t have an account in those places,” he said. “My point is that you should not be part of the human ecosystem behind the place.”
While Jones’ comments largely focused on promoting his own work, people like him also became famous on X (then Twitter) for posting original opinions directly to the platform. Because social media algorithms no longer prioritize text-based commentary like this, it is harder to break through as Jones and his cohort did more than a decade ago.
However, plenty of sharp modern journalists and hosts have broken through by working those algorithms with new forms of content, such as vertical video, YouTube essays, podcasts, and livestreams.
The group to whom Jones was actually speaking here may be writers specifically, whose work and craft is generally devalued in the modern content ecosystem.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.