For my thesis I’m trying to crowdsource suggestions to make a list of the top 20 experts who are using Twitter to discuss the future of the news.

In brief, my thesis will look at:

The proliferation of the Internet is challenging mass media’s age-old arrangement of producer and consumer as well as the economic models on which the centuries-old industries have relied. These factors in combination with a worldwide recession and its resultant drop in advertising revenues have caused a crisis in the newspaper industry; a crisis in which they question their long-term survival as a viable news delivery system. This study will apply a discourse analysis to explore how the online debate on the future of the news, and more specifically newspapers, is structured, and will look at what that says about the issue. These conclusions will then be used to build a framework of the major concepts in the current discussion. The purpose of this research is to explore, describe and evaluate the scope of existing discourse in order to arrive at an in-depth understanding of the issues surrounding the debate on the future of news and newspapers.

To do my discourse analysis I am going to to track 20 Twitter accounts for 2 months. So my question to you, helpful readers, is who do you consider to be the most influential, interesting, verbose, engaged/engaging people on Twitter who are discussing the future of the newspaper?

Once I’ve finalized the list I will put it on listerous and make a Twitter list for others to use.

*edit*

Suggestions thus far (thanks all!):

From Leems:
@jeffjarvis
@buzzmachine
@knightfdn

From @memeticbrand:
@wemedia
@the_standard

From @CNWgroup:
@kirklapointe
@mathewi

From @laheadle:
@jayrosen_nyu
@niemanlab
@megangarber
@jny2
@steveouting
@howardweaver
@chanders

From @bxmx:
@david_eaves
@cheeky_geeky
@bxmx