Cision and Don Bates of George Washington University have recently conducted a research on Print and Web Journalists’ usage of social media for researching and reporting stories. Results are based on 371 responses from September 1, 2009 to October 13, 2009.

There are approximately two thirds of all journalists and writers using social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) for research, only about half of them use Twitter and magazine writers have the lowest Twitter usage.

The graph above shows that there are more Newspaper and Website writers using Twitter for research than the magazine writers.

From the Report:

Corporate websites, press releases and especially PR professionals remain consistently used resources for journalists when writing or producing stories.

The least experienced journalists use information from press releases and PR professionals more now than five years ago to write their stories, and more so than their more experienced counterparts.

Blogs (64%) are the most frequently used social media tool to publish, promote and distribute what journalists write, followed closely by Social Networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook (60%) and Microblogging sites such as Twitter (57%).