The Anderson Cooper of Black Twitter Believes Journalism Can Survive Influencers
- by Wired
- Jun 14, 2024
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Phil Lewis never planned on leaving Michigan. Detroit was home. Still, he wasn’t exactly happy with the life he’d built, he tells me recently over Zoom. After graduating from Michigan State University, where he studied sociology, Lewis cycled through Teach for America and landed a gig as an elementary school educator, teaching seventh-grade history and social studies. But it wasn’t enough. “I was kind of devastated a little bit because I just didn’t really know what I was supposed to be doing,” he says.
This was around 2015, a bellwether year in digital media. Everything about the news industry was evolving at a volatile speed, as sites like BuzzFeed and Gawker chased virality, and legacy publications tried to keep stride.
By that point, Twitter was the front page of the internet. Grassroots movements spurred by political and economic corruption—the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter—had recast the platform into ground zero for breaking news. Social media was ushering in a new age of citizen journalism. Lewis, with his 30,000 followers, decided to jump in. “Vine was still a thing. Influencing was a relatively new concept. I was a teacher with a decent following. A friend of mine was like, ‘You should get into social media.’”
That was almost a decade ago. Today, Lewis is behind one of the most popular—and most reliable—news accounts on X. He also landed a more traditional media gig, as a front page editor for HuffPost. Lewis has a sixth sense for news, and has made himself into an indispensable voice on an app that, these days, is drowning in noise (having 409,000 followers doesn’t hurt either). He did so by sticking to a particular formula: platforming overlooked and underrepresented stories with more context, humanness, and understanding.
“I don’t want to bring attention to everything because there’s so much engagement bait online now,” Lewis says. “What I try to avoid doing is lighting something on fire.”
In 2022, following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and its subsequent rebranding as X, users furiously debated the platform’s demise, and many wondered how apocalyptic its loss would be for independent and nontraditional media. Twitter was the internet’s newspaper—who would fill that void if it was suddenly gone? What wasn’t up for debate was Lewis’s impact. “You know where Black people on here get their news???? This guy,” @solomonmissouri tweeted, referencing his account. Added @AkanButNoJeezyy: “And @Phil_Lewis_ does not miss, okay?! One time for the Black Anderson Cooper.” Their point being: Who tells your story matters. It is a lesson Lewis has never lost sight of.
Jason Parham: Is it still possible—in 2024—to achieve the kind of career and presence you have online?
Phil Lewis: It’d be really hard. I wasn’t competing with so many different voices. I think [journalist] Taylor Lorenz coined this term, but newsfluencers weren’t a thing back then. At least in my mind, it wasn’t. But now there’s all sorts of people who do it or want to do it. My trajectory also coincided with the rise of digital news outlets. I rose with that. HuffPost and BuzzFeed had been around, but people were trying to figure out what it meant to find news and to surface news on social media. Today, it wouldn’t be impossible, but it would be very difficult to go from a middle school teacher to working as a front-page editor at a news outlet where I have created my own lane. We’re competing with so many eyeballs.
Most Popular Is that how you see yourself—as a newsfluencer?
I’m a journalist first, but there are people who fall under that category. Influencers aren’t a bad thing, necessarily. I know there’s a lot of debate around it. But there are people who have leaned into the news as part of their brand and what they do. People thought that’s what I was. I actually found out that a lot of people didn’t even know that I was a journalist until relatively recently. They thought I was, and this is a quote, “Some dude sharing news stories online.”
For the longest time I thought you were a bot.
A lot of people thought I was a bot. Or that I was just scheduling posts. And now I feel I can’t change my profile picture. People might think I got hacked.
Jason Parham is a senior writer for WIRED. Dial Up is his interview column with the people defining digital culture.
Is the attention economy so fucked now beyond the point of saving that it’s impossible to break through the chatter in a meaningful way?
When you think about it, we’re competing with Instagram aggregators, blogs, social media pages focused solely on news, podcasts—it’s all over the place. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. If it wasn’t for social media, I would not have been able to take the path I did. We are in a crisis of attention, but what I find more frightening is the rise of misinformation and disinformation. That’s more chilling to me than the amount of people who want to do the best work that they can, whether that’s on YouTube or TikTok. There’s more than enough happening out there for us all to get a piece or whatever.
True.
I’m more concerned about the bad actors who are going after people who may not be reading the link. They might just be reading the headline, right? They might just be looking at the post with the black font that says, hey, this is what's happening on Instagram, and that’s it.
Because the state of news media has gotten so splintered, is this why you do what you do?
I want to be able to be a resource for people online as far as getting them the information that they need. I mean, I love when people come up to me and they’re like, “Hey, you know, I found out about this through you.” I love hearing that because I do think there's so much out there that there’s an equal amount of things that are being missed or underreported or that maybe people aren’t paying attention to.
The reach you have is pretty incredible.
What I like most about whenever I’m sharing a story, I know that it’s not just readers who are at work who, you know, just opened up their phone and were like, “Oh wow, I found out about this story.” It's also assignment editors who follow me. People at The New York Times, at CNN—
—at BuzzFeed. I bet they regret rejecting you now [laughs].
It’s funny because people will tell me, “Hey, we shared your tweet in our newsroom Slack channel. That’s how we found out about the story, and now we’re going to write about it.” So you don’t have to have millions of followers, but I have a reach that’s a little different. And that’s important to me.
“We are in a crisis of attention, but what I find more frightening is the rise of misinformation and disinformation.”
Phil Lewis
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