How journalists use Twitter
An editor explains how he uses Twitter to dig up stories, and why you should pitch him on Twitter instead of email.
I’ve tweeted three times in the last 12 days. Three.
Yet I’m on Twitter constantly.
I have 15 active columns on TweetDeck. At any time I have a dozen Twitter app alerts on my phone. I probably spend more time crawling through Twitter than watching “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle” trailers, and I spend a lot of time watching those.
What the hell am I doing, and how do I source stories without tweeting much? By doing these five things:
1. Tweeting—just not from my personal account.
As a senior editor at Thrillist, I oversee our four biggest editions: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Since I live in the Bay Area, though, I constantly tweet from our @ThrillistSF handle, whether it’s something we couldn’t cover in full (the event happened too late, someone sent Nerf guns to the office, a tour of the Niners’ new stadium), teaser photos for an upcoming story or awesome stuff we see before anyone else, like this:
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