Abstract
It is becoming exceedingly important for scholars to study and understand how Twitter is influencing news reporting. Using quantitative content analysis, this paper examines the use of tweets as quotes in alternative web-only news organizations compared to traditional print organizations. This study uses a quantitative content analysis of more than 1000 quoted tweets and more than 3000 news articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, and The Huffington Post. Findings suggest that while print news publications most often use Twitter to quote official sources and for opinion comments, alternative web-only news publications use the medium differently. Additionally, alternative web-only news publications quote Twitter in a higher proportion of articles.