Tuesday, May 8, 2012

CIO’s East Africa’s Dennis Mbuvi, Highest tweeting journalist worldwide


By Ruth Kang'ong'oi

Mr Dennis Kioko Mbuvi
Dennis Mbuvi, CIO East Africa's staff writer on Monday was ranked as the most active journalist on Twitter Worldwide by Muck Rack. He was closely followed by Julia Ioffe, contributor for The New Yorker, Damien Seaman, and Tony Halpin, Moscow correspondent for the Times of London.

Muck Rack  maintains a list of journalists around the world and their Twitter profiles , giving a snapshot of what journalists around the world are reading, thinking and commenting on right now.

The Muck Rack Daily analyzes what journalists are saying in a daily email that has become a must read for journalists. Muck Rack started with only 150 journalists on Twitter, a good portion of all the journalists on the fledgling service at the time. Muck Rack now lists thousands of journalists on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Quora, Google+, LinkedIn and more who are vetted by a team of editors.

While Muck Rack tracks what journalists are saying about the top news of the moment, Muck Rack Pro finds what journalists are saying about any given topic and sends real-time press alerts. Journalists can get listed on Muck Rack and use Muck Rack Pro for free. 

Communications pros and those seeking to find journalists can do it here.By verifying the journalists on social media who do the muckraking for major media outlets and analyzing what they say in real time, Muck Rack delivers a glimpse of tomorrow’s newspaper to you today. 200 tweets shy of 17,000 tweets, Mbuvi has been on Twitter since 17th of January 2009 as @denniskioko. He mostly tweets issues across the board, ranging from current news item to  the strange and weird, like what is hot on 9gag.com.

His tweets on Monday mostly consisted of commentary on the National Hospital Insurance Fund saga and on a self satirical letter written by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni to Nation Media Group Journalist, Charles Onyango-Obbo. He also sends several tweets having conversation with followers on the controversy behind the selection of the recent Kenya ICT Board Tandaa Local Content grants. Mbuvi has been writing for CIO East Africa since May 2010 after undertaking an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Kenyatta University.

In addition, he handles technical and social media strategy and issues at CIO East Africa. He has also been a speaker at the African Broadcast and Film Conference, speaking on the challenges facing local content producers in marketing their content, and at the inaugural Joomla Day Kenya where he spoke on the opportunities and challenges of Joomla.