Four Indian journalists — Rajat Sharma, Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt and Sudhir Chaudhary — figure amongst the top 10 scribes most followed on Twitter, according to the ‘State of Journalism on Twitter 2022’ report compiled by Mud Rack.

According to the report, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow usurped CNN’s Anderson Cooper as the most followed verified journalist on Twitter since the last such study in 2017. The new names on the list include those of Sharma, Editor-in-Chief of India TV, at No. 3, followed by Washington Post contributor Carlos Loret de Mola.

Since the last reported State of Journalism on Twitter in 2017, the media landscape continues to rapidly evolve and so has the way journalists use the platform.

Though Indian scribes figured in the Top 10 list of the ‘most followed on Twitter’ category, no Indian media outlet made the cut for the list compiled on collective data for companies.

The Top 10 list of media outlets with the most collective followers featured organisations like CNN, ESPN, NYT, MSNBC, The Washington Post, Fox News, BBC and The Guardian.

Some of the media outlets with the most journalists on Twitter (in the top list) included organisations like the BBC, Bloomberg News, NYT, Reuters, AP, CNN, WSJ, The Washington Post and ABC news from Australia.

The lists were pulled from the Muck Rack platform with followers and join date data coming from Twitter. For rankings, only those journalists were included who were verified Muck Rack journalists.

According to the report, in the category ‘media outlets with the most tweeting journalists’, BBC jumped from No. 7 in 2017 with 494 tweeting journalists listed on Muck Rack to the No. 1 spot with 1,783 tweeting journalists today. Bloomberg News moved up from No. 4 in 2017 to No. 2 with 1,314 tweeting journalists.

Most followed journalists who created their accounts in the last year and were new on Twitter included names like Sadiya Parveen, a freelance journalist and social media activist based in India, who takes the No. 1 spot with 15,367 followers. Coming in at No. 2 is Abdul Kalam, another freelance journalist based in India. Linda Amiani, Chief National Correspondent at the Kenya Times is No. 3 with 7,105 followers.

In the 2022 State of Journalism,  it was revealed that 77 percent of journalists value Twitter more than any other social media platform. Some journalists (39 percent) say they plan on spending more time on Twitter this year than they did last year. Finally, journalists ranked Twitter as one of their top destinations for finding news, second only to online newspapers and magazines.

And even amid controversies and potential acquisitions, it’s likely Twitter will remain a leading platform for the foreseeable future, the authors of the report said.

The New York-founded Muck Rack, according to its website, provides free tools to help journalists automatically compile and showcase their portfolios, track the impact of stories, keep up with news and expand their online footprint. The organisation automatically aggregates the publicly available information about journalists and media outlets to power the world’s most comprehensive, up-to-date search engine of news and the people creating it.