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Social media, as one key platform for citizen journalism, are becoming a useful newsgathering tool for journalists. Based on data from a nationwide probability sample of newspaper editors in the United States, this study investigates the extent to which newspaper editors consider social media an influential news source. Results show that variations in editors' ratings of social media as a news source were related to multiple levels of influence, including professional journalistic experience, organization size, community structural pluralism, and citizen journalism credibility. Implications are discussed for the roles of social media in news production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of social media usage such as Twitter during the March and April 2009 apparent flood danger to the Red River Valley, which separates the North Dakota and Minnesota in a region that extends across the U.S.-Canadian border into the province of Manitoba. It also assesses the credibility of public journalism and user-generated media. Further, it mentions that an analysis of tens of thousands of tweets sent during the flood threat period indicates mechanisms for information production, distribution and organization in use in the otherwise unmanageable information space of microblogging.