“It takes a lot of courage to be boring.”

Jim Lehrer, former host of PBS Newshour

There’s nothing more terrifying for a journalist today than an unentertaining story.

With more and more people turning to social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook to get their news, journalists are under enormous pressure to produce content that can compete with the rest of what people see on those platforms. This content is: highly entertaining, instantly understandable, generally uncontroversial, crowd-pleasing, compelling in an immediate way. It’s often personal, often funny, often emotional, often superficial, often indulgent. Some of these are good attributes and some aren’t, but such content shares one thing: it’s very difficult to compete with.

Enter Twitter News, the latest example of a tech platform inching slowly but formidably into the journalism space.

I noticed it last week when I updated my Twitter app, and saw that I am part of an A/B test for a feature called News. The feature aggregates trending news articles, supplying headline, photo, and a list of top tweets for each.

Twitter is not a news company. However, with 232 million monthly active users, 86% of whom use Twitter to consume news, its news-reading audience dwarfs that of any media organization. Coupled with its role as a platform with content from countless news groups, that means the decisions Twitter makes could have widespread implications for the field of journalism itself.

What follows are some thoughts on what these implications might be for the quality and substance of reporting and the very nature of doing journalism.

Summary: By stepping between you and the news outlets you follow, Twitter has quietly moved itself into the editorial space. Such moves by platform giants threaten the diversity and depth of news content, as well as the free expression of audiences.