Four studies at the closing research panel of the 2011 International Symposium on Online Journalism asked what newsrooms did with Twitter.
Dale Blasingame of Texas State University coded almost 2,300 tweets sent by San Antonio newsrooms during a shooting, and found most were promotional, followed by breaking news. Station accounts fared worse: one pushed automated links to web stories, nothing else. His recommendation: cap promotion at 20% of a newsroom’s messages.
Carrie Brown of the University of Memphis, with Elizabeth Hendrickson and Jeremy Littau, presented an exploratory study of Twitter as a route to underserved communities. Students aged 19 to 29 treated it as a pseudo-anonymous space for banter and entertainment, but stumbled across news there and were receptive to getting it from journalists — provided there was a relationship, not just broadcast headlines. Littau reported African-American students expressing a stronger preference for information and expression than Caucasian students.
Marcus Messner of Virginia Commonwealth University, with Maureen Linke and Asriel Eford, tracked the top 99 US newspapers and top 100 TV stations: 198 had Twitter accounts by 2010, up from a third in 2009 to more than 90%. Personal communication accounted for 5.7% of tweets in 2009 and 3.5% in 2010. “Most tweets are still shovelware,” Messner said. “They are not engagement of the community.”
Elvira García de Torres of Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera presented findings from 27 outlets across seven Iberian and Latin American countries: mostly headline links, only 5.6% of Facebook messages conversational, five newspapers engaging in conversation — and no rules or planning around social media anywhere.