It's definitely less work that investigative journalism, but to the extent that twitter is influential, it's a topic that should be covered.
IMHO, the media has (at least) two important jobs: 1) conduct novel investigations and 2) summarize the firehose of events and ideas into a form concise enough for someone to read on a daily/weekly basis. "What people are saying on social media" falls squarely into the second category.
I can list many reasons, the top few would be:
1. It is too easy to game "what people are saying" on social media
2. Loudest voices / most extreme positions get picked up, amplified, and passed off as "what people are saying"
3. It is too easy / predictable to game what kind of messages the media chooses to summarize
4. None of it matters (see my original post about what people say vs. what people do)
If an idea is worth discussing, it is worth discussing regardless of its source (social media or otherwise). Conversely, and I know this is open for debate, but Twitter is not a great medium for discussing ideas.
Social media regularly reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote:
“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
That is, on average, what people are saying on social media. It is not worth summarizing and covering.
This is circular reasoning. It's only influential because journalists cover it. And they only cover it because "it's influential".
Journalists don't cover Social Media. They cover Twitter. They ignore Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, etc. Those are all social media with approximately the same user base as Twitter (Reddit probably has more). But totally ignored by print journos.
I disagree that would be "the valuable version." That's just "the more quantified" version. A music critic's list of the 100 best songs of 2020 is not inferior to Billboard's list of the 100 most popular songs of 2020 as determined by quantified data.
Twitter is a cultural phenomenon, and its milieu(s) and output aren't completely unworthy of journalistic attention. That's not to say it's a top shelf subject, but the "news" properly covers all kinds of similar things, and some, like sports for instance, have even less value.
