Newspapers that Twitter: July numbers

It seems everybody’s writing about Twitter.
• USA Today wrote about it on July 21, and crashed Twitter.
• Unrelated, USA Today’s Pop Candy (Whitney Matheson), a long-time Twitter user, debuted a comic book at Comic-Con that was based on her Twitter feed.
• Just as Twitter went a little loopy and revised everyone’s number of followers, Get Satisfaction Boris introduced TwitterCounter. See how the number of followers has fluctuated in the last seven days. (The count is updated in the middle of the night … in Amsterdam.) Twitter’s follower count has been fixed, by the way.
• Twitter bought Summize — still the best way to search for something or someone on Twitter.
• CrowdStatus (still in alpha) is fun when it comes to breaking news or tracking the last post by a group of users. I created a crowd of newspapers (one account per paper) that have updated in the last week. Could also be useful if you’re paper has several Twitter accounts.
• We’ve known for awhile that when it comes to breaking news, you can usually find it first on Twitter. Last week’s California earthquake was no different. Seconds after the quake, tweets showed up. The first main-stream media alerts? About five to 10 minutes later. I know this has been true during the Illinois earthquakes, too. It’s another good reason why it’s smart to keep an eye on what people near you are Twittering about.

OK, let’s get down to business.

What we really want to know is how newspaper’s that Twitter are doing — let’s start with July’s 10 biggest winners and losers.

This is the first time we’ve had so many losers, so to speak, and there are more accounts that lost users. San Antonio’s @mysa_breaking picked up 15 new followers and still hasn’t posted anything. The Chicago Sun-Times is the only paper to have accounts on the winner and loser list.

Speaking of the Sun-Times, let’s talk about usernames real quick. On May 27, the Sun-Times created a clever little Twitter account, @thewire_cst. It had a few followers, but you can’t find it — it doesn’t exist anymore. The account didn’t follow the paper’s naming configuration: Take a look, all but two of the Sun-Times’s 15 Twitter accounts start with “cst_”. I have no problem with consistency, but that means columnist Jay Mariotti‘s account, found at @jaymariotti last month, has become @cst_mariotti this month. Mariotti is new to Twitter, but he has name recognition; I can’t help but think using his name, instead of the CST prefix, would be more useful. (Political columnist Lynn Sweet still uses her name without the CST prefix.)

The Sun-Times isn’t the only one to pull a switcheroo. The New York Times nearly gave me heart failure when I couldn’t find 14 of its accounts. They’d all been renamed, changing the “nyt_” prefix to “nytimes.” The former @nyt_food account was lost, though — I just found it renamed @nytimesdining with 754 followers (it had 602 followers last month) but TwitterCounter says that account didn’t exist on Aug. 1 and I certainly couldn’t find it, so it’s not included in the chart. (I’m not saying name changes should be cleared by me either, but it sure would be helpful!)

Here’s a closer look at the 303 newspaper Twitter accounts (28 more than last month). On average, each account as 131.85 followers — down slightly from last month. The “new to me” accounts are marked according to when I discovered them. Accounts that have not posted any updates are marked with an asterisk.

Do you know of a newspaper that is using Twitter but isn’t on the list? Tell me about it.

Take a look at numbers from June.