Journalists continue to lean on Twitter as fewer Americans use it as a news source

Rob Tornoe | for Editor & Publisher As Boston Globe Celtics writer Adam Himmelsbach summed up about as perfectly as anyone can, “Twitter is at once so great and so horrible.” Ignore Elon Musk for a moment. Twitter remains a powerful tool for journalism, especially when it comes to breaking news. Following the right experts or local voices can enhance your beat reporting, while sports reporters can create a devoted following of new consumers by sharing mini-scoops and observations about a team or player. Summarizing your news reports with Twitter threads can simultaneously enhance its reach and increase engagement. Through it all, it can be difficult to remember we’re not writing for Twitter and the dopamine hit that comes when one of our stories starts racking up retweets. In reality, the audience for our reporting on Twitter is shockingly small.  How small? According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, just 13% of adults in the U.S. regularly get their news from Twitter, trailing both Facebook and YouTube. In fact, more than three-quarters of adults online don’t even use Twitter, making it the least popular among all the major social media networks, including LinkedIn. Yet nearly 70% of U.S. journalists…
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