Tweets on Twitter from the listserv.

The question isn't just how [to tweet], but why? Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., [together] bring people to our electronic sites. How many hundreds of thousands of "followers" "friends," etc. would we need to cultivate before these sites became profitable? I'm not sure we can count that high. Are there newspaper Websites that make money? How do they do it? Unless we know that, facilitating the move away from paper seems to me to be no closer to a solution than shrinking staffs and newspaper widths.

Also, where do you all find the time? Perhaps I'm just lazy, but it's about all I can do to read a couple of newspapers, scan and read stories from the wires, attend our daily meeting, host the occasional visitor, research and write two editorials, and read and edit our two pages (six on Friday) in the 10 hours I spend here each day. If I had to do all the rest of that too (and I expect I will have to sooner or later), my tweets would sound more like wheezes.

--Kendall F. Downs, associate editor, Toledo Blade

Folks, it is about the audience. Actually, [journalism professor] Jay Rosen refers to them as "the people formerly known as the audience." Connecting with people, participating in conversations, getting and giving out info ... It can take as much time as you want it to, or very little.

These are people in our communities from whom editorial boards and newspapers traditionally have been accused of being too far removed. If we really want to connect to our communities, these are people we might want to spend a little more time to talking with and listening to. We want them to care about whether or not we survive.

I can see (literally, from looking at the click-through stats) that using Twitter helps us drive Web traffic, which allegedly has some monetization value. Plus, it's another way to reach people and have influence. What good is an editorial board if it doesn't reach people the way they want to be reached? I'd argue its influence is diminished if it relies just on print or a hard-to-find section of the Website to put out its work.

Regarding the time-sink concern: It's very valid. I probably spend about 10 minutes a day updating my www.twitter.com/mjslte account and 5 minutes updating the www.twitter.com/ across the board account with links to our editorials. There's only so much time 140 characters can take to create.

--Sonya Jongsma Knauss, letters editor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

My wife is much better at [tweeting] than I am. She's built up more than 400 followers; I have a little more than 40 so far (but growing by one or two a day). My wife edits the Food and Home and Garden sections here and posts links on Twitter to her reporters' stories each morning. She quickly expanded her following by agreeing to follow tweets from a couple of new local churches that use Twitter to connect with their members. The church members in turn began following her Tweets. That approach for expanding your reach can work with just about any organization that uses Twitter to connect with its members. The cool thing is that when you link to one of your editorials each of your followers can then re-Tweet it to their followers, greatly multiplying the people who see the link.

--Tim Swarens, editorial page editor, Indianapolis Star

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