Sites Covered: Muck Rack and JournalistTweets
Now Muck Rack makes it easy to follow one line, real time reporting. On Muck Rack users can track messages on Twitter written by the journalists who do the muckraking for major media outlets. There are a number of recently added useful feature on Much Rack including:
- Broadly defined beats. Among the most interesting to follow are business, technology, and arts and entertainment.
- Trending topics, which this morning includes LeBron (last second shot) Magic, London, California, Chinese, Mardi Gras and Memorial Day.
- Feeds from more than 34 sources including CNN, SI, Huffington Post, and of course the New York Times.
JournalistTweets is a third party search engine for your favorite journalists on Twitter, a relationship-building tool for PR professionals and journalists discussing business, technology, lifestyle and entertainment, and health.
While Muck Rack offers a more comprehensive list of journalists, sources, and categories, Journalist Tweets allows you to search for a journalist, and if you don’t mind entering your username and password the convenience of at @replies to journalists directly through the site without having to visit Twitter.
Successful search results on Journalist Tweets, in this case, technology journalists and bloggers I currently follow on Twitter:
- Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb
- Dave Winner, Journalist, Blogger
- John Markoff, The New York Times
- Kara Swisher, The Wall Street Journal
- Saul Hansell, The New York Times
- Tom Foremski, SiliconValley Watcher
- Duncan Riley, Techcrunch
This is not a statistically representative list. What’s more, some journalists may be using pseudonyms or may not Twitter at all.
Even with search, Journalists Tweets is not Muck Rack, they provide little if any context – tweets do not contain the journalist’s real name (if they use a pseudonym) title, and publication he or she writes for. And there’s no incentive to keep searching (no recommendations) on failed searches.
Like Much Rack, if you can’t find your favorite journalist on Journalist Tweets you can suggest one, the industry the journalist covers, outlet, and Twitter handle (if you know their handle), provided of course the journalist has a Twitter account.
Even with great hooks into Twitter, like most third party (twitter) beta sites, you’ll have to exercise patience with search on Journalist Tweets, their curated list will get you started, and the search engine will help you find many of your favorite journalists on Twitter…most of the time. That is of course, if you’re not already subscribed to the services of Muck Rack.
