Many reporters now use Twitter as both a place to look for sources as well as an outlet to publicize their stories. Blogger Alice M. Fisher shares several resources and tools for reseraching the reporters and bloggers who are the most important to your organization’s work and for compiling a Twitter list of media contacts whom you want to follow or target for story ideas, complete with their titles, media outlets, and usernames. Click here to visit Fisher’s post.

Twitter is now the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace (Compete, 2009). A year ago, it has over a million users and 200,000 active monthly users sending over 3 million updates per day (TechCrunch, 2008). Those figures have almost certainly increased since then. With the torrential streams of Twitter updates (or tweets), there’s an emerging demand to sieve signals from noises and harvest useful information.