Joking. But you're right. When you combine the reach of the main feeds, the reporter feeds — hell — and Soraya, you have a captive audience. No doubt about that, dude.

– AndrewNystromLAT: This was an internal memo, so I'm thinking it probably didn't go through a particularly rigorous editing process… But since you brought it up, I believe Jon was referring to our combined followership, not just the number of followers to our main twitter account.

The Times, as you may or may not know, has several Twitter feeds. Notice The Moment there at roughly 550K followers, for example. There are a number of other feeds with relatively large numbers, which, combined, come to something between Ashton and Ellen.

Would this methodology withstand peer review, or even our typical copy editing process? Probably not. But there you go anyway.

“Did you know that The New York Times is No. 2 on the Twitterholic.com Top 100 Twitterholics based on Followers? (Behind Ashton Kutcher but ahead of Ellen DeGeneres.)”

Actually, @nytimes is #14 Twitterholic.com (with an enviable 935,824 followers, as of this comment, or 939,128 on twitter.com itself) — perhaps he meant #2 in “New York City” behind Jimmy Fallon (@jimmyfallon)? http://twitterholic.com/top100/followers/byloca…

In any case, I warmly welcomed @nyt_Jenpreston to the social realm via an as-yet unanswered @reply and wish her all the best. It's a social jungle out there.

~ @latimesnystrom / http://latimes.com/twitter

I understand what you're saying, and I agree that if the Times were to follow *only* special-interest groups of a certain persuasion, that case would be made. If it followed most people who followed it, I think the Times could stand behind what it's doing without worry.

On a much larger point, even if the Times chose to not follow anyone back, I think it still should interact with its Twitter followers. Take the Ashton Kutcher example: He doesn't follow that many people, but he responds to people, which makes his presence on Twitter much more rich. I think that's where the Times could benefit. Someone there could be monitoring what is being sent on Twitter (via @replies to the Times), and responding with @replies back. That type of interactivity makes the Times, and anyone else, much more accessible. You wouldn't answer every question or respond to every person (it would be nearly impossible), but you could pick-and-choose. Listening and interactivity are central to what Twitter, and social media in general, are all about.

I think it's good that the Times is asking for opinions. Thanks for listening to ours, and thanks for the comment!

Cheers,
Robert