Last fall, the blog Journalistics published a list ranking the top 25 newspapers on Twitter, based on their follower counts. (TheWrap followed up with a similar list for magazines.)
I figured it's time we update the newspaper list, to see how the troubled print industry has fared — and at what pace the audience for their tweets is growing.
At 3,062,437, the New York Times remains the only American newspaper with more than a million followers. The Chicago Tribune, at 829,742, is number two, followed by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
In terms of growth, both the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Newsday more than doubled their follower counts in the five months since the initial list was compiled. (The Chronicle, with 21,075 followers, is up 121.6 percent, Newsday 118 percent.) The Washington Post, with 88 percent growth, added more than 180,000 followers.
The New York Times, perhaps a victim of its own early Twitter success, grew its number of followers by just 15 percent — the smallest growth rate of any newspaper included here.
A few other things to note:
>> The follower counts were taken between 3 and 4 p.m. ET on Thursday, March 31.
>> I used the official Twitter feeds for each publication, and did not include related section or blog feeds (the New York Times, for example, has several) or popular columnists (the Times' David Carr, with 309,706 followers, would rank as the fifth most-followed American newspaper on Twitter just by himself).
>> I did not include the follower count for The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's iPad "newspaper" (it's 22,072).
>> I limited it to U.S. newspapers.
* When Journalistics compiled its initial list, it used the @chicagotribune Twitter feed's follower count, which was 34,490 last October. (Now that feed has 45,299 followers.) The paper also operates the vastly more popular @ColonelTribune account, which bills itself as "a more gentlemanly version" of the Tribune's eponymous feed.
** As pointed out in tweets to me, there were several other regrettable oversights: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's @ajc (34,683) Austin's @statesman (32,471), the Boston Globe's @BostonUpdate (28,035), @LasVegasSun (8,904), Las Vegas @ReviewJournal (7,224) and Honolulu's @StarAdvertiser (5,744). They've since been added.
