News

Get the Line on Journalists Using Twitter

You know, there are a lot of people I WANT to follow on Twitter. However when I see that they’re twittering dozens of times a day, I just can’t do it. They’d just overload my tweet stream and drown everyone else. That’s why I’m always happy to learn about services which aggregate tweeters; recently I learned about one for journalists called Muck Rack, available at http://muckrack.com/.

Muck Rack

What appears to be a full tweetstream of all the journalists on the site goes down the front of the home page. This is interesting but not really what I like the site for. For that you want to use one of the tabs at the top or links on the side of the page — I like the tabs.

The tabs slice and dice these lists of journalists, as well as organize their multimedia and links. The tabs will let you look at the latest as well as the most popular links that the journalists are posting. You can look at individual journalists by beat or look at a whole tweetstream of that beat. (Beats include health, environment, sports, and several metro areas. The technology beat stream is very nice.) You can view journalists or tweetstreams by source. (Surprised at how many media outlets have LOTS of Twitter users.) You can look at pictures recently posted to Twitpic. (Derek Jeter and the Space Shuttle were two big themes when I looked at it, inasmuch as there were any themes at all.) The beat and source tweet lists I looked at had RSS feeds associated with them — niiiiiice — but the photo and link streams didn’t.

The last tabbed item is called “Press Releases.” The site charges to have tweet-sized ads listed on this page. It’s $1 per character, so reading them is like reading a telegram at times. I did find a few interesting links though.

If I had any criticism of Muck Rack — and I’m not sure I do, as there’s already so much here and it’s splendidly organized — is that there should be more local journalists. There are large metro areas organized with some leftover journalists put into “regional,” but I KNOW there are lot more journalists than this out there in smaller areas using Twitter. I would love to see them too. After all, all news does not take place JUST in metro areas.

But that’s a minor pick; there are lots of people on this site posting lots of interesting information and the RSS feeds are a big bonus (I can get updates from several people at once and hey, I don’t have to overload my regular incoming Twitter feed.) If you’re a news junkie at all it’s a can’t-miss.

(PS: And if you’re not a news junkie, visit the site anyway and look at the top of the site for the black bar leading to other aggregated tweet services, including ones for designers, musicians, pets, VCs, and coders.)

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