Twitter Practices of Mainstream US News Outlets

Cardiff.
We move on to the next speaker at Future of Journalism 2009, Marcus Messner, whose focus is also on Twitter (and in fact, he and Alfred independently named their papers the same...). The focus here is on the use of this tool by mainstream media in the United States, however; such media use Twitter as a research tool, but especially also as a news dissemination tool, particularly for breaking stories, and as a means for building community.

Twitter was founded in 2006, and had some 6 million users by early 2009, this has grown to 20-30 million by now. Some 11% of Americans use Twitter, and the audience is comparatively older than for other social media forms; some journalists use it very regularly now, and there is a whole show devoted to it on CNN. Again, the disputed Iran elections were a major tipping point for the service, of course.

So how did traditional news media use Twitter, perhaps especially in the context of using it as a form of social bookmarking or links distribution? This was analysed first in the context of social bookmarking through Twitter of the lead story for each of the top 100 newspapers and TV stations in the US, on 25/26 March 2009, and second in the context of the tweets by the 180 of these organisations which used Twitter accounts by 4/5 April 2009.

Only some 37% news outlets allowed social bookmarking of their stories through Twitter, while 100% had email dissemination functions, 96% had some social bookmarking tools available, 84% had Facebook functionality, and 38% MySpace (we're talking about the 'share this'-type tools at the bottom of stories here). There was no difference between newspapers and TV stations in their own use of Twitter accounts, but there are vast disparities in the number of followers for these accounts; regional and local media had far fewer followers than major national and international media, perhaps unsurprisingly; for the most part, there were also no significant differences in what sharing tools they offered, other than for Twitter sharing functionality, where newspapers were nearly twice as likely to have such functionality on their sites.

Only 65% of the news outlets which had Twitter accounts actually tweeted during the two days of the study; on average, there were 8.7 tweets per day per news outlet, and there was great variation in tweeting practice between them. 94% of tweets were news-related; the rest were personal in some form; some 93% of tweets included hyperlinks, so this is mostly about promoting the news outlets' published content, rather than real engagement with followers. Newspapers tweeted almost twice as often as TV stations (10.4 vs. 5.4 tweets per day).

So, Twitter is mainly a promotional tool for these outlets; there is very limited linking to external sources, and very little real community around these feeds. This means that news outlets may need to invest more time in community building and using tweets to provide shovelware; the situation to date seems very similar to the shovelware we encountered in the early days of Web-based news. There is little engagement with Twitter as a social network here.

Technorati : FoJ 2009, Twitter, United States, community, journalism, mainstream media, news, social bookmarking
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