SABEW to assess social media use by business journalists

The Society of American Business Editors and Writers is conducting an anonymous survey of business journalists throughout the country to determine how they use social media technology such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

The results of the survey will be made available to all SABEW members by the end of June on the organization’s web site. The data will be updated annually to determine whether new media usage by business journalists is changing.

To do that, it needs the help of business journalists. If you are one of these people, please go to the link at the end of this message and click on it. Answering the questions will take less than a minute, but the results will provide valuable data for other business journalists to see where they stand when it comes to social media usage.

“While most of us use social media, we want to examine how it’s used for reporting and disseminating business news,” said Kevin Noblet, SABEW’s president and the managing editor for wealth management coverage at Dow Jones Newswires. “We want to quantify what’s happening with social media on the business news desk, and to what degree.”

The survey results will be analyzed by SABEW’s research director, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill journalism professor Chris Roush, and will be broken out by how many business reporters use different social media and for what purpose.

Click here to go to the survey.