ASSOCIATED PRESS: Ashton Kutcher has beaten off rivals to be the first member of the twitterati to secure one million followers. The 31-year-old actor had been in a race with news network CNN to be the first ‘twitterer’ to reach the milestone. And shortly before midnight Thursday he achieved his goal. MORE
CNN: As of Wednesday afternoon, Kutcher’s Twitter account had 896,947 followers, putting him in 
third place in the number of followers. Britney Spears was in second with about 905,640 followers, and CNN’s breaking news account was watched by 937,787 people on the site. No single Twitter account has attracted 1 million followers, according to TwitterCounter and Twitterholic, two sites tracking the most popular Twitter users.VCNN maintains 45 official Twitter accounts, with a total of more than 1.3 million followers. Kutcher is racing the network’s breaking-news feed specifically. MORE
HUFFINGTON POST: At 2:13am EDT Friday, Ashton Kutcher took the crown in a much-hyped race against CNN to 1 million Twitter followers. The friendly competition included three on-air pleas by CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Erica Hill in the span of ten minutes. I wrote a post at the start of this race criticizing Kutcher for “not getting it.” After watching his livecast on ustream.tv for the last few hours, I gladly take that back. Kutcher gets new media. His livecast during the race — a continuous live video stream over the internet — was an engaged conversation. He read followers’ tweets on air, asked questions, and actively engaged his audience using Twitter. He linked us to YouTube clips and his chosen charity, www.malarianomore.org. He advanced his next cause, fighting human trafficking. “We can and will create our media,” Kutcher said in his victory speech on ustream.tv. “We can and will broadcast our media. We can and will censor our own media ourselves. We are over a million.” MORE
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