Tweetdeck Must Install For Sky News Staff – How Twitterful Are Indian Journalists?
According to a news source, Sky News has asked all it’s news staff to install Tweetdeck – Twitter’s most popular desktop application in a hope that it will motivate the journalists to use social media for newsgathering and reporting. Julian March – executive producer of Sky News says “The big change for us in 2010 is evolving how social media plays a role in our journalism. We no longer ghettoise it to one person, but are in the process of embedding throughout the whole team”.
Tools like Twitter Live Search helps almost any one to gather real time news about a particular event that has happened very recently or even in the past. Infact you can log on to Journaliststweets.com and find a lot of global journalists across news media companies tweeting on twitter.
So how well are our Indian Journos using Twitter?
We did a quick online research to find out How the most famous Journalists in India are using Twitter and what tools do they use to make their presence felt on twitter or gather news using twitter. Here is a short summary of what we learned about Indian Journalists and their use of Twitter.
Most of the famous Indian News Journalists use either the Twitter Website or the Twitter Mobile Website to post tweets to their profile. You can have a quick look at the twitter profiles of Vir Sangvi, Barkha Dutt, Raj Deep Sardesai, Pritish Nandy & Sagarika Ghose. Most of them simply use the Twitter Web or the Twitter Mobile Web to tweet. Mr. Vir Sangvi has lots of followers but again, he does not follow any one, which means he is not using twitter to the fullest, as following no one means you won’t be getting any news updates from any one.
Then we have the experimental kind of journalists like Mr. Vikram Chandra (CEO, NDTV Networks & Anchor of Big Fight and other shows). On visiting his twitter profile you will notice that he actively uses different ways to post tweets like using the NDTV Social, Twitterrific, Twitscoop, The Web and sometimes even The Twitter API!
And finally we have some more well-known journalists who make use of various Twitter tools. For eg: N. Ram, Sucheta Dalal and Kanchan Gupta are active users of Tweetdeck. Suhasini Haidar uses UberTwitter – A Twitter Client for Blackberry.
The Bottomline
Although many Indian Journalists are on Twitter, I still have a feeling that they are not making use of twitter to the fullest – this is what I can make out from the way they use their personal Twitter accounts. Following more people is always good because this way you tend to get more news which may not make it to the TV otherwise. And there are many journalists who have signed up for accounts on Twitter but have no activity at all!
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