Sizing Up “Media Twitter”: Exploring Population Extent, Beats, and Utility of Social Media

Abstract

This mixed-methods study explores which types of journalists are on social media and what forms of knowledge-related utility they find there for their practice. We leverage computational techniques to identify more than 166,000 journalist profiles, in English, on Twitter and to examine their beats, follower counts, and volume of activity. We pair this with findings from an original 2019 survey with policy-oriented journalists (N=450) who work on a variety of beats. Two-thirds of journalists believe social media tools help them frequently in their reporting work across many dimensions. Regression analysis finds significant associations with the technology and international affairs beats, as well as among younger journalists and those with a national audience. Our Twitter analysis, based on a dataset of 2.5 billion tweets collected in mid-2020, finds that the beats of politics, international affairs, and technology see the highest relative number of journalists on Twitter. The findings furnish a descriptive, quantitative picture of “Media Twitter” and speak to questions about social media’s place in journalism.