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.
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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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