Top Ten Media People on Twitter

The news business is not what it used to be - with digital media, it's much closer to the people who read and comment on the news these days than (almost) to the action. In fact, when it comes to Twitter, it is often the people (formerly known as audience) who find themselves in the middle of the action and who do the reporting.

I've seen a couple of lists of journalist and media companies with presence on Twitter. This one here is a Wiki and this one compiles journalists in the UK. BeatBlogging.org is also calling for all people practicing journalism on Twitter to comment to compile a new list.

Media and new media publishing is a topic of great interest to me. Partly because I work both in advertising and public relations, which are becoming more entangled with each other online. Think Google ads and search - search engine optimization and search engine marketing in the same tool. Somewhere in there is also a thought-provoking idea of Google as digital media company.

Partly also because many of the professionals I most admire are editors and journalists. That's the reason why I wanted to invite your contribution here today to select the most influential media people on Twitter. I could think of five - off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more so do add in the comments and we will vote for the next five.

Business Week

Twitter Name: @johnabyrne

Media Person: John A. Byrne, editor-in-chief, BusinessWeek.com. I met John in 2003 when he was editor-in-chief of Fast Company magazine and had the opportunity to spend time with him at FC Real Time conference as well as the magazine in NYC. John is a good listener and learns fast. I'm not surprised that he'd become comfortable on Twitter so quickly. His stream is a good mix of reporting from events, personal interaction, and highlights from BusinessWeek.com. I published an interview with John here a few months ago.

Stats: follows 1,256 / 5,946 followers / 1,847 updates

The rest of the organization: There are many other journalists and editors from BusinessWeek.com on Twitter (you will find them on the wiki linked above). This is an organization that has really started participating in a distributed fashion stretching from blogs now onto a different, public platform. Update: here's the twittering gang from BusinessWeek.

One thing: the one differentiating characteristic of John's stream is pointing out the day's "most-read" story at BW.com.

TechCrunch

Twitter Name: @TechCrunch

Media Person: Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. This is a startup and tech news blog network. Michael Arrington has announced that he is "taking a break" from blogging on TechCrunch.

Stats: follows 557 / 54,427 followers / 6,595 updates

The rest of the organization: Erik Schonfeld, co-editor at Tech Crunch is also on Twitter.

One thing: TechCrunch breaks a lot of news on technology. Yesterday, for example, we were barely realizing that Google has a problem and the site already had 122 comments on a post about Google flagging the whole Internet as malware.

Wonkette

Twitter Name: @anamariecox

Media Person: Ana Marie Cox,is a Wonkette emerita, political junkie, self-hating journalist and occasional grown-up. That's how she describes herself on her personal blog. She used to blog at Time, and that is what caught my attention at first. Then I spent more time reading her work and was pulled in by her style.

Stats: follows 151 / 17,888 followers / 1,916 updates

The rest of the organization: Perhaps a news publication is looking into enrolling her help with their digital property.

One thing: Her Twitter style is very conversational.

MarketingProfs

Twitter Name: @marketingprofs

Media Person: Ann Handley, editor or head of content as she puts it, Marketing Profs, where she also wrangles a team of bloggers of which I am part. This reminds me I ought to write something for the DF soon, before I get booted out. I interviewed Ann for this site as well.

Stats: follows 14,230 / 14,075 followers / 7,147 updates

The rest of the organization: Marketing Profs is a fine online publication and I was lucky enough to meet some of the people who make it possible at the B2B Forum in Boston last June. I like the idea of making the content come alive with events.

One thing: In addition to the great sense of humor, Ann is a community builder. It is clear from her tweets that she enjoys highlighting the good work of others.

GigaOm

Twitter Name: @om

Media Person: Om Malik, founder and senior writer, GigaOm. Malik was a senior writer for Business 2.0 where he focused on broadband and its impact on our lives and prior to that senior writer at Red Herring where he focused on telecommunications. He was part of the founding team at Forbes.com. That's quite a bio. I smile at myself. The first time I linked to GigaOm, I had no idea of who he was. I was observing his reporting skills in a post I wrote about the Skype Outage. Then I wised up and concluded that his reporting was better than the WSJ.

Stats: follows 528/ 17,420 followers / 2,712 updates

The rest of the organization: The Network of sites provide one of the leading daily online news reads for the key influencers in the emerging technology market place. As you can see from the tweet here, the team members from GigaOm are on Twitter. Looking at the team bios, I cannot help but think that indeed new media publications is where many journalists may find continuity to their work.

One thing: Malik retweets and shares a lot with others on Twitter. He is someone I would enjoy meeting for sure.

__________

The rest of the list is up to you.

Who are the other five (news) media people on Twitter? Who do you follow ? What is interesting and different about them? Put their names in the comments, describe the "one thing" that makes them interesting, and we will put them to the vote on this post later tomorrow.

We have some early suggestions:

Comments

[Chris Baskind]

OK, I'll add a few to the list. While it's not a person, I think BreakingNewsOn @breakingnewson deserves a mention. It's one of the media things that makes Twitter valuable to me. BBC Breaking News @bbcbreaking is also blazing fast. There's Jim Long @newmediajim , of course. Brian Stelter @brianstelter is one of NYT's bloggers, and always interesting. Media Bistro @mediabistro is a great resource for media professionals. I'm big on bicycles and Carlton Reid @carltonreid is a standout journalist in this field. Here's a gigantic list of journalists and reporters using Twitter: http://bit.ly/4nT8Rl , and a similar compilation of media outlets: http://bit.ly/C7Lc . Finally, I'd be very happy if more people followed us at Lighter Footstep: @lighterfootstep .

[Michael Sean Wright]

Would suggest Martina Stewart, Producer at CNN. She often twitters on the stories they're working on.
http://twitter.com/MMStewart

During these troubled economic times (take a drink,) Jim Cramer helps parse the financial news.
http://twitter.com/MadMoneyOnCNBC

If we're including Twitter All Stars like Arrington, would not miss Leo Laporte. Leo is building the truly live streaming info network (the original TWIT- http://twit.tv)
http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte

Huffington Post understands the power of the real-time web. Even if you don't subscribe to their "politics" you should monitor how they disseminate news in twitterspeak.
http://twitter.com/huffpost

Finally- US, monitor any subject/event using the # hashtag of the subjects you're interested in. Using http://tweetdeck.com I can set up live feeds of trends.

[Michael Sean Wright]

I mistyped the link to Leo Laporte's TWIT Network - should have been http://live.twit.tv/

[Marian B. Wood]

Thanks for the ideas--I've just expanded my Twitter follows based on your post.

[Thewirds]

Hi
Thanks for all the suggestions and the link. All share are well appreciated and I'm looking forward to be their follower, thanks

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Chris - you had me discover a couple of new ones.

@Michael - thank you for the welcome additions. I would have fixed the link for you :)

@Marian - glad to be of service

@Thewirds - thank you for taking the time to read and comment.

[Tanya]

For workplace issues this is the gal: http://twitter.com/careerdiva

[Ann Handley]

How did I miss this? Thanks, Valeria, for highlighting me and others. I'm honored. Re media people: I also like @rafe (Rafe Needleman)

[Craig Peters]

As Twitter continues to grow, it grows more important that the media people on Twitter think about how to add real value and not just tell the Twitterverse (a word as stupid as "blogosphere," by the way) that they're eating a ham sammich. More on signal-to-noise ratio here: http://www.lohad.com/?p=2458

[Craig Peters]

By the way: @andersoncooper tweets often and with real value

[Maria Elena D uron]

Here's a continually growing list of media on twitter:
http://mediaontwitter.pbwiki.com/