Bulldog Reporter/TEKgroup Study Shows Increased Usage of Online and Social Media Resources

NEW YORK - Public relations practitioners should shift their energies to online newsrooms, blogs, and social media. The third annual study conducted by Bulldog Reporter and TEKgroup International, Inc, indicates that journalists’ usage of these technologies continues to increase. The 2009 Journalist Survey on Media Relations Practices Executive Summary is available on www.tekgroup.com.

For the third year in a row, the findings will be released during the PRSA International Conference November 7-10, 2009. Those findings again reveal that the greatest impact to journalism practices due to new Internet technology is journalists’ ability to access corporate news and contact information online 24 hours a day. Nearly half of all journalists report visiting a corporate website or online newsroom more often than once a week.

While approximately half of journalists do not monitor blogs, almost 23% report regularly receiving RSS feeds from five or more blogs to research targeted topics — a 23% increase in this number over last year.

The study also showed more than a 10% increase in journalists visiting social media sites for research purposes. Today, more than 82% of journalists use social media, compared with about 75% last year. Almost 69% of journalist respondents now say they visit a social media site like Facebook or YouTube at least once a month, up from about 53% last year.

A new question in this year’s survey indicates the growing popularity among communicators of Twitter: More than 25% of all journalists indicate they use Twitter once a week or more.

More than half of journalists indicate that they now seek audio or video material from corporate websites, up about 10% from last year. A majority (74.4%) of journalists report that they use local newspapers to follow news, while more than 64% check the New York Times, almost 52% use Google News, and about 31% employ Yahoo! News.

The survey results, conducted September 10-22, 2009, encompass 2,354 respondents, of which approximately 46% were editors or editorial staff and almost 35% were reporters or writers. The survey’s objective was to establish benchmarks for how journalists use the Internet to conduct research, and then to track year-over-year changes.

Visit http://www.tekgroup.com/mrpracticessurvey to download the survey.

About Bulldog Reporter – www.bulldogreporter.com

Bulldog Reporter is a B2B publishing company that serves public relations and investor relations professionals by providing an inside view into the workings of journalists and top media organizations and best practices related to new media relations technologies, and by covering news in the PR and IR industries. The Bulldog Reporter product and service lines are owned by Infocom Group.

About TEKgroup International, Inc. – www.tekgroup.com

TEKgroup International, Inc., an award-winning Internet software and services company, develops Online Newsrooms and E-business software solutions for the public relations industry. TEKgroup clients include Accenture, Curves, Detroit Lions, Ford Motor Company, Prudential Financial, Starbucks, VMS, Walgreens and the Public Relations Society of America.