Any organisation that wants to be trusted long-term should ideally publish from a URL it owns and have an RSS feed (that functions as a notification mechanism). Doesn’t matter if it’s short- or long-form.
From Axios:
PBS has not tweeted from its main Twitter handle since April 8, following Elon Musk’s decision to label the outlet “government-funded news.”
NPR said Wednesday it was suspending its use of Twitter after the platform labeled it “government-funded.”
The journalist Matt Taibbi has been “shadow banned“:
Mashable’s Matt Binder solved the mystery and revealed, somewhat hilariously, that Taibbi’s acount appears to have been “max deboosted” or, in Twitter’s terms, had the highest level of visibility filters applied, meaning you can’t find Taibbi in search.
NPR and PBS have their own websites, of course, and Taibbi has published at his own URL Racket News. Even though Taibbi’s site is a Substack newsletter, he can move it to whatever online publishing platform he likes while keeping his online presence unchanged at that URL.
Far, far less consequentially, this site has existed since 2004 at this URL. Social networks have come and gone, and this site itself has been published on Movable Type, Blogger and WordPress, but the URL has remained the same.
An argument in favour of social networks is how easy it is to subscribe to someone’s posts – you just tap ‘follow’, and posts show up in your feed.
RSS is less convenient – but not a great deal. You paste the site’s address into your RSS reader, confirm and… that’s it. If you like you can organise your feeds by folder, but you don’t have to.
What you get in return is writing from those that you follow, untampered by boosting/de-boosting algorithms like on social networks, and without risk of shadow-banning or de-platforming. If they publish it, you’ll see it.
If you’re a news organisation or independent journalist, offering that kind of experience to your readers as your primary online presence is a must long-term.