I’ve been out of the country without my computer (or any Web access!) for the past week, and found this in my flooded e-mail inbox when I returned:
This entry from Erica Smith’s graphicdesignr.net shows the June 2008 numbers from newspapers that use the micro-blogging service Twitter to post breaking news or sports updates or otherwise communicate with the audience.
When I wrote about newspapers using Twitter more than a year ago (click here), only a handful of newspapers had jumped in, including The New York Times, The Oregonian, and The (Nashua, N.H.) Telegraph, to name a few. Now, the list is at more than 300 and growing.
With any subscription service, as newspaper people know, there’s “churn.” This seems to be the case with Twitter, too. Similar to text-message alerts, it’s possible that people stop “following” a newspaper’s feed because there are too many messages or just because of the frequently noted Twitter downtimes.
Regardless, it’s encouraging to see that so many newspapers have adopted Twitter because it shows that newspaper digital media executives are really paying attention to whatever might be the “next hot thing”.
Some of the more notable statistics from Smith’s entry (as of early August):
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The number of known newspapers on Twitter, according to Smith, is 303.
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The average number of followers for those 303 newspapers Smith is following on Twitter was 131.85, slightly lower than the month before.
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The New York Times had the most followers with 5,199. USA Today’s Pop Candy had 2,088, and The Wall Street Journal had 1,230. (These are for the main NYT and WSJ feeds; more people have subscribed to topic-specific feeds such as business or politics or breaking news.)