Twitter in the Newsroom

It's getting to that point where I will, indeed, try to publish all my data from The Times that I used in my dissertation as a book. One of the things I looked at was how journalists were using social media.

At a conference, NYT editor Lauren Heron said:

"I think my job will probably not exist in five years."

Why?

Presumably, everybody will be on social media platforms.

But as I was writing up my research yesterday, I discovered what my colleague Dr. Hindman would call something like a Power Law effect with social media users at The Times. (It's funny, once you start to look, you see power laws operating everywhere).

It goes a little like this.
@nytimes: 4.5 million followers
@nickkristoff: 1.4 million followers
@pogue: 1.2 million followers
I think I'm missing some more people with millions of followers but it drops sharply to those who have about 300,000 followers like
@carr2n (David Carr)
@brianstelter
And then to people who have just about 10,000 +/- 5,000 followers, like, ironically, @jillabramson, the Times' executive editor.

This tells us relatively little about how these journalists are using Twitter, but I encourage you to take a look at their feeds. The @nytimes bot tweets out links to headlines - there's no engagement with audiences. It's a robot. @nickkristof does an awesome job answering audience questions. @pogue uses audiences when he happens to have a question, but rarely do we see any signs of audience engagement otherwise. David Carr and Brian Stelter are generally carrying on conversations among elites.

On another note, I embarrassed myself with Evgeny Morozov on Twitter today:

Evgeny Morozov ‏ @evgenymorozov Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
@nikkiusher there's nothing to translate there - these are real Web cam captures from the Russian polling stations
Evgeny Morozov ‏ @evgenymorozov Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
@nikkiusher dunno, seems like a regular Russian plebiscite ;-)

Apologies for not being more visual and linky like I preach. Not sure how to use this mac, to be honest!