Op-Ed Contributor

Twitter Has an Old Media Problem. Here’s a Solution.

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CreditCreditDavid Paul Morris/Bloomberg

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Twitter is a communications marvel, with 317 million active users who instantaneously convey a collective reaction to news.

But a business based primarily on advertising needs advertisers. Twitter has not figured out how to attract enough of them to eke out regular quarterly profits. A few potential buyers, including the Walt Disney Company and Salesforce.com, have kicked the tires but decided not to buy the company.

On Thursday, Twitter reported its latest quarterly results — a net loss of $103 million, only modest growth in revenue and layoffs of 9 percent of its work force — confirming that the company is still stuck in the same unhappy place.

I have a solution: Larry Page, a founder of Google, should buy Twitter. Pull out his own wallet and buy it. Personally.

It doesn’t literally have to be Larry Page; it could be any civic-minded billionaire who sees Twitter for what it is: a primary source for news and information, not the next Google or Facebook.

When Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post, it wasn’t because the newspaper was a compelling business opportunity. It was, and remains, a hallowed institution of journalism.

The country’s pre-eminent newspapers, including this one, have long been controlled by families who have understood that the press is not just an ordinary industry, but a civic calling. Twitter is not yet treated as hallowed, but it has the makings of an institution that could be.

Twitter puts no intermediary between speaker and listener. When public figures do the actual composing — and, oh, what a difference between Donald J. Trump’s own tweet eruptions and those prepared by his staff — we get not just information but also a glimpse of the candidate’s unguarded self that we don’t get in other media outlets. For that alone, we should thank the heavens for Twitter.

This election has also highlighted Twitter’s capacity to augment coverage of civic events like the three presidential debates as they are happening. Instead of waiting for the predictable reactions of network anchors, guests and pundits, we can use Twitter to see reactions, smart and snarky alike, from hundreds of personally chosen observers while the debate is still on.

Put another away, if journalism is the first draft of history, Twitter is the first draft of journalism.

The nation’s founders recognized the importance of speedy dissemination of news when they provided for low postal rates for newspaper subscribers and allowed newspaper printers to mail one another newspapers without charge. The content of many newspapers consisted mostly of reprints of articles obtained from these exchanges. In the same way, links in tweets serve as an indispensable guide to the best of journalism that originates outside of Twitter.

So who better to rescue Twitter than Mr. Page, a founder of the company dedicated to organizing the world’s information? Twitter takes the first cut of doing that organizing, in real time.

Mr. Page also commands an empire built on algorithms. And Twitter has a pressing need for better algorithms to keep the platform free of the sludge discharged by racists, anti-Semites and other trolls.

The Anti-Defamation League, in a recent study, counted 2.6 million tweets with anti-Semitic language in a year, but despite Twitter’s disavowal of “hateful conduct,” the league found, only 21 percent of the anti-Semitic accounts were suspended. Twitter relies on humans, not software, for enforcement, and they are overwhelmed.

This computer-science problem — filtering out trolls — remains as difficult as any of the moonshots being tackled in Alphabet’s Google X division. If Mr. Page developed a way to help Twitter keep the hate speech out, that technology would not only win back the advertisers who are fleeing because of trolls, but also, if shared, enable newspapers to reopen their comments’ sections at their own websites, promoting the airing of differing views in public space. What service to the public could surpass that?

While I’m offering Mr. Page unsolicited advice about what he should do with his money, I’ll also note that Twitter’s current market capitalization, of around $12 billion, is a triumph of hope over reality. If Twitter’s revenue and user growth fail to surge, the asking price will fall. Look at Yahoo: Eight years ago, the company spurned an acquisition offer from Microsoft for more than $45 billion. This year, it accepted an offer from Verizon for about a tenth of that.

In 2011, Mr. Page had an exploratory conversation with one of Twitter’s founders, Jack Dorsey, about Google’s acquiring the company, but Mr. Page’s interest then was in using tweets in search results. Google subsequently struck a deal to gain access to tweets that allows it to enjoy the milk without buying the cow.

As Twitter’s prospective suitors have one by one turned away, Twitter’s board surely has come to the realization, at last, that the company has less to do with the sexy, endlessly expanding world of “social media” — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat — than with the seemingly duller world of old-school newspapers, limited circulation and less-than-stratospheric profit margins.

Mr. Page does not have a Twitter account and is a famously reticent chief executive. But a stray remark he once made suggests he is well suited temperamentally to be Twitter’s white knight. Mr. Page told a friend that our laws would be much improved if their length, in characters or words, was capped to keep them brief. This would ensure that lawmakers would actually read the drafts in their entirety before voting on them.

William Randolph Hearst built a newspaper empire on sensationalism when that’s what the audience demanded. Today, consumers are, above all else, impatient, preferring a news snack rather than a feast. Mr. Page, a connoisseur of brevity, would seem to be the perfect billionaire rescuer for Twitter, the highest-circulation short-form “newspaper” on earth.

Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University, is working on a book about Stanford University.

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