(Steve Duke)

Flash poll: Number out of 180 freshman journalism students with Twitter accounts - 0.
Number out of 180 who have never even heard of Twitter - 180.

That summary is sufficiently short to send as a "tweet," the 140-character-or-fewer messages on the microblogging network.  

Here's the longer version. I asked for a show of hands at a gathering of all of Medill's incoming freshmen during orientation week. Like most adults, I often assume that teens are so immersed in new media that there is nothing they don't know. While I expected there would be some in the group who hadn't heard of Twitter, and many who did not have accounts, I was surprised by the all-or-nothing show of hands.

I took the poll during a freshman forum on ethics, because I wanted to talk about the controversial use of Twitter by the Rocky Mountain News in September to 'tweet' the funeral of a 3-year-old killed when crashing vehicles slammed into the store where he was having birthday ice cream with his mother. Some in the Rocky's audience weren't happy and journalists piled on, although the rabbi officiating at the funeral said the journalism was professional and compassionate.

You've read about the controversy, and that isn't my point here. I'm more interested in the poll results and how we should think about new communication media.

As media fragment, audiences splinter and circulation declines, everyone is in a mad scramble to figure out ways to hang onto old readers and reach new ones. Each new bit of technology holding promise of capturing a few more eyeballs gets chased.

We certainly encourage innovation and risk-taking. My colleague Vickey Williams wrote last week about the danger of abandoning innovation during economic retrenchment.  And Rich Gordon regularly writes about building newsrooms of the future, including his post two weeks ago about the new media project his graduate class is engaged in for a client company.

I don't disagree with them, but want to suggest that innovations and experiments with technology be thoughtful and focused; that we not succumb to the new, stretching already thin staffs to deliver information across so many platforms that their work is swift but shallow, a trend you can already see. Of course, there is also the need to find revenue to support the journalism.

Sometimes the breathless technology reporting can be bewitching. Last week in a New York Times business story about Twitter and Yammer, two microblogging sites, the Times wrote "Twitter, a start-up company in San Francisco that has become a household name..." (my emphasis).

Well, maybe it's a household name in households occupied by New York Times reporters, other media elite, technology aficionados and academics. However, the hint that the Times may have overstated its case just a tad bit was in the very next sentence of the story: "At least three million people have tried its free service..."

Three million people in a country of 305 million people and 126 million housing units. Lot of households left out of the math. Even among New York Times readers, I'd wager there are a lot of households in which Twitter is not a household name. As my show of hands demonstrated, it's not even a household name in the homes of tech-savvy young journalism students. 

So does this mean newspapers shouldn't experiment with new platforms like Twitter? Of course not. It means new platforms should be used like a rifle, not a shotgun. Look at the audience research for a given platform, and adapt its use appropriately.

If I'd seen this August Time article reporting the analysis of Twitter's user audience, I might have been less surprised by my quick poll of freshmen.  

Time reported that 18-to-24-year-olds were the majority of users early on, but now the biggest group is 35-to-44-year-olds, comprising 26 percent of users. Further, 63 percent of registered users are male, and 57 percent are from California. So one conclusion might be that you use Twitter when you're reporting something that matters to California men, especially if they are 35 to 44.

But Time points out that there is a lot more nuance to the audience analysis. Nearly 15 percent of Twitter visitors comprise a "collection of young and ethnically diverse singles living in big-city metros like Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami." This group "tends to work in the arts and entertainment industry, drive small cars and espouse very liberal political views," Time reports.

The second largest group, making up about 12 percent, are in their 40s, "likely to drive a hybrid car such as the Toyota Prius, earn household incomes over $250,000 per year and also identify with very liberal politics."

Both groups are Web savvy, "are often looking for a new job (they spend a lot of time on job-hunting websites) and new relationships (they like dating and matchmaking websites too)," Time says.

When you plumb the user data that deeply, it suggests more nuanced uses of the platform than Twittering a funeral, including some that might provide revenue. With every experiment or innovation, redesign or new beat structure, think audience first, platform second.


By Steve Duke (s-duke@northwestern.edu)
Steve Duke is managing director for training at the Media Management Center and Readership Institute, and an associate professor at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.

Facebook, instant messaging and texting seem to be the most-used tools among students here. Some of the journalism grad students have twitter accounts -- but they're older, mostly in their mid to late 20s, fitting with the current profile of twitter users.

Posted by  Steve Duke at October 31, 2008 10:23 AM

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