A study of the Twitter feeds of 13 major American news outlets by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, with the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, found the platform being used as a distribution channel and very little else. Across more than 3,600 tweets sent in a single week, just over 90 per cent carried a link to a story on the organisation’s own website. Two per cent asked for information or eye-witness accounts. One per cent were retweets of anything originating outside the outlet.
Individual journalists’ accounts were only marginally different: across 13 of them, three per cent of tweets asked for information and six per cent retweeted material the outlet had not produced.
Pew’s own reading was that this looked familiar: “This behavior resembles the early days of the web. Initially, news organizations, worried about losing audience, rarely linked to content outside their own web domain.”
The sample was small, but it matched what other research had found. Marcus Messner, Maureen Linke and Asriel Eford had shown that the official accounts of leading US newspaper and television outlets functioned largely as an automated RSS feed of the latest stories, and another study found newsrooms generating a tweet automatically whenever a story was published. Going beyond broadcast remained the exception rather than the practice.