Sky journalists forced to use Twitter

Julian March, executive producer at Sky News Online, has revealed to Journalism.co.uk that Tweetdeck (the leading Twitter desktop client) will be installed “on all staff machines within a month”.

Sky has been slowly increasing its use of Twitter having appointed a ‘Twitter correspondent’ last year and rolling out the @skynewsbreak account.

March states:

“The big change for us in 2010 is evolving how social media plays a role in our journalism. We no longer ghettoise it to one person, but are in the process of embedding throughout the whole team…”

At Wildfire, we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of journalists using Twitter over the last year or so. There are a number of reasons for this. We’ve seen journalists using Twitter to publicise their recent articles, communicate directly with their readers and also, increasingly, to source stories or find spokespeople.

For a PR, this is a really exciting development. I now talk to journalists on Twitter every single day. Not just about work-related issues, but anything that comes up – from cricket to snow. This enables us all to build closer relationships with the journalists we work with.

In the tech sector, where technologies like this are adopted quickly by journalists, this has been a common exercise for a while now.

The move by Sky suggests that more and more journalists will soon be on Twitter, which can only be a good thing for all of us in the PR industry.

Related posts:

1. 56% of journalists think social media is important for producing and sourcing stories A survey of US journalists published by Cision finds that...
2. Rags to riches: The secret of Twitter’s success It’s been quite a year for Twitter. Despite not yet...
3. UK makes up 7% of global Twitter users; London still the top Twitter city There has been a lot of noise in the last...
4. Twitter announces new approach to shortened links In a post on the company’s official blog, Twitter has...
5. Times they are a-changin’ Ten years in PR got me in a nostalgic mood...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.