A paper presented by Marcus Messner at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in 2009, written with Asriel Eford, asked what American news organisations were actually doing with Twitter. It examined almost 200 newspapers and television stations with accounts, counting tweets and looking at their news value and use of links.
Adoption was near universal and evenly spread: around 90 per cent of both newspapers and television stations had an account. Making it useful to readers was another matter. Only a third of the outlets offered a way to share a story on Twitter, against 100 per cent offering “email this story” and 80 per cent offering Facebook.
Activity was thin and very unevenly distributed. Of the 180 outlets with accounts, only two-thirds tweeted at all during the period studied, averaging 8.7 tweets each. Four organisations, among them CNN and the New York Times, had more than 10,000 followers apiece, while a quarter of the sample had fewer than 500. Just over 5 per cent of tweets were personal; most pitched the organisation’s own content, and links overwhelmingly pointed back at its own material rather than outward.
The conclusion was that American news media were using Twitter as a promotional channel, newspapers more energetically than broadcasters. Messner argued that community building deserved more attention, so that the platform did not repeat the shovelware phase of early online journalism.