Journalists and social media

By Jared White

I recently have been wondering what type of social media journalists use and how often these journalists use it. I turned my sights toward using Twitter and comparing how often these three journalists update on the social media network.

Tom Palmer is a writer and reporter for The Ledger newspaper out of Polk County Florida http://county.blogs.theledger.com/. Currently Palmer has 182 people following him and is only following 21 people. These are relatively small numbers compared to other journalists using Twitter. Palmer seems to update his profile at least once every other day or sometimes posting many tweets at once with a number of articles and information. No personal tweets or responses are given to other users. Palmer uses Twitter, most likely, for the sole purpose of updating local residents of his stories or news that interests him.

Judy Battista is the New York Times National Football League writer. Battista follows 286 people on Twitter and has 5,790 followers. This twitter account has the most followers of any of the journalists that I researched on Twitter. Battista constantly updates her profile everyday within an hour of each other and responds to most of the people that are posted are her profile. She does posts her opinions on different football stories and answers questions from different people. Battista has embraced the Twitter means of social media and seems to be able to connect her research and articles of football to a following of users who generally are interested in her.

Jonathan Alter is a Newsweek Columnist for the popular news magazine Newsweek. Alter follows 13 people and is followed by 2,890 people. Alter does use Twitter every few days to update his followers on articles, ideas, and different stories that he is working on. He does respond back to some people’s comments and tries to express his personal beliefs on different subjects. Alter, like Palmer, seems to rarely use Twitter for anything but news purposes. He does try to embrace the ideas that come from using Twitter and seems to be gaining more users over time.

According to the observations I made with these journalists on Twitter, I found that all three journalists mostly used social media for business. Alter and Palmer seemed to only post articles related to their direct line of work and either did not comment or rarely commented on their profiles to users. Battista has embraced the need to connect with her followers and is freely open to sharing opinions with her followers. These results show that in one form or another that journalists are using Twitter and other social media to discuss news. I can only believe that over time, this will continue to increase.