Newspapers and Their Use of Twitter

Last night i was reading through Erica Smith's excellent monthly wrap-up post with July's data on Newspapers outlets that Twitter (for Twitter newbies that means newspapers that have a Twitter account and broadcast news via the microblogging platform that sends updates to those that follow (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length). In these monthly posts she provides an overview of the biggest gainers and losers including data on all the newspapers that she is aware of that have Twitter accounts. She also highlights new services that might be interesting to newspapers that are built on Twitter including things like TwitterLocal which filters messages based on location which could be useful for various reasons like picking up local 'scoops' (useful in other ways as well!).

This morning over on Techmeme, i followed this link over to the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab to Five Ways to Gather and Report News with Twitter that outlines some ways that media outlets could benefit from being on Twitter that i found interesting especially in the use of 'investigative' reporting. Even though i am not reporter or responsible for any media twitter account i certainly find this conversation compelling and as a user have been finding myself using Twitter more and more to be 'updated' on news following news sites like @marketwatch or new media sites like @techcrunch but i still find the most compelling news alerts on Twitter come from messages that my 'trusted' twitter friends push out my way before i have a chance to read it in my in-box or on a news website that i have to visit. Maybe i am just not following the right Twitter accounts but thanks to Erica's list i can be fully aware of what is available and i can keep an eye on the newspaper industry's adoption of Twitter as another publication push channel.