Journalists enjoy using social media

By Kerry Schofield
@obsesscreative

I recently compared three journalists on Twitter for their use of social media. I was interested to learn how they interact with others, what kind of posts they make and their general use of the social media site.

Richard Deitsch is a writer and reporter for Sports Illustrated and SI.com, which is an online sports magazine http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/. Deitsch follows 398 people and has 9,412 followers. 

Octavia Nasr is the founder of Bridges Media Consulting and is Editor of OctaviaNasr.com. http://www.octavianasr.com/.Nasr served as CNN’s senior editor of Middle East affairs for more than ten years. Her career began at the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. She also served as executive producer of the LBC nightly news. Nasr follows 804 people and has 9,650 followers.

Kim Painter writes about health and parenting for USA Today’s Your Life section http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/painter/index.htm. Painter follows 365 people and has 1,270 followers.

Deitsch updates daily, sometimes with just one hour in between tweets. He has a lot of sports updates. Deitsch is a jock and most of his tweets relate to sports. But he does include a few personal tweets about the weather. His focus is mostly on the sports business. Deitsch’s Twitter page has the Sports Illustrated logo running down the side. Deitsch has a lot of interaction among users and has a large number of @ tweets to users. Deitsch seems to be holding two-way conversations with others while they are online also.

Nasr’s updates are sporadic. She updates daily with at least one update. Nasr will however update multiple times within a one to two hour period. Her updates  are a mix of personal and news related items relevant to her background. Nasr promotes her website and business and retweets topics of interest. Nasr replies to more than one person at a time and seems to have personal conversations going on with others we are not privy to. Her tweets are not so much business but more personal. Nasr uses links sparingly.

Painter updates daily but maybe only once or twice per day. Although Painter updates daily, she does not update as frequently as Deitsch. Painter’s tweets are mostly concerning health-related matters. She includes a link to other news stories in most of her tweets. This indicates she does a lot of reading on the Web. An example of one of the health topic posts is about the sources of caffeine http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20313656_1,00.html. About half of Painter’s tweets begin with @ replies indicating that she is holding conversations on Twitter as opposed to just tweeting her thoughts and findings.

My general observations about the journalists are that they use Twitter for both personal and business use at the same time—they are mixing business with pleasure. Nasr said on her blog that she has developed friendships through the use of social media. All three journalists seem to enjoy using social media as seen in the frequency of their tweets. They are following and reading tweets, responding and retweeting. There is a high-level of interaction. I did not see any obscenities or slanderous remarks used by these three journalists.