About

By the time a story reaches a newspaper, someone on Twitter already got it wrong, someone else corrected them, a third person turned the correction into a different story, and a fourth person made all three of them into a take about what the whole thing really means. That process is not a distortion of the news. It is increasingly how the news works.

I've spent years watching how narratives form and travel online before they calcify into conventional wisdom. The work started in communications, helping organizations figure out why a message hadn't landed, where it had gone sideways, what had filled the gap. That's a different kind of literacy than journalism, but a useful one. You learn to read a conversation as a system rather than a sequence.

World Dispatch is an attempt to make that reading legible. Not what's being said, but how it's moving, what it's displacing, what the shape of the debate tells you before anyone has declared a winner. Twitter is a strange place to spend your working hours. It also happens to be where a remarkable amount of consequential framing happens, usually fast and usually before most people are paying attention.

I don't post opinions. I read, watch, and write. Based in London.