Bertrand Marquette

Social media didn't just change the distribution of news — it changed who holds the authority to report it. The newsroom used to be the gatekeeper. Now a creator with a phone and a niche audience can break a story, frame it, and reach more people than a national outlet, without ever calling themselves a journalist. The upside is speed and access: stories surface faster and from places traditional media never reached. The cost is that the algorithm, not the editor, now decides what gets seen. Reach rewards emotion and velocity, not accuracy — so the incentive structure of news has quietly shifted toward whatever travels well, not necessarily what's true. For the creator economy specifically, the line between "creator" and "journalist" is dissolving. Audiences increasingly trust individuals over institutions, which puts real editorial responsibility in the hands of people who never signed up for it. That's the story I find most interesting to cover: not whether social media is good or bad for news, but who's accountable when the audience trusts a face more than a masthead.

For the research and SEO side, I rely on the tools that show me how information actually moves online — Google Search Console and analytics to see what surfaces and why, an SEO suite like Ahrefs or Semrush for keyword and authority data, and Google Trends to catch a topic before it peaks. A lot of my reporting starts as a data anomaly: a search pattern or a traffic spike that signals a story before anyone's written it. For the influence and creator side, I watch the platforms directly — TikTok, Instagram and YouTube native analytics, plus social listening tools to track how a campaign or a creator is actually performing versus how it's being marketed. And for the craft itself, the honest answer: a clean writing setup, a spreadsheet for everything, and AI tools as a research and drafting assistant — never as a replacement for verification. The judgment still has to be human.

Twitter