Man, everyone’s in a tizzy over The Washington Post’s new social media guidelines for reporters. The full text of the policy is on PaidContent.org, but to summarize, WaPo expects its editors and journalists to be responsible on Twitter/Facebook and not post anything that might be construed as editorializing.
Bloggers are having all kinds of fun opining on how restrictive and backwards the policies are. Journalists should be able to say whatever they want, right?! (TechCrunch rails on WaPo here). I disagree with just about everything in that post. News organizations have a huge stake in maintaining objectivity. They owe their very existence to it. In the case of reporters, they’re paid for their unbiased take on news events. Why should WaPo let them go shoot their mouths off on Twitter? Credibility and the perception of objectivity of the kind that WaPo relies on is not easily obtained, but it is easily lost.
PCMag has a much more relaxed policy, mainly because they see Twitter as a traffic driver to the PCMag.com site and a way for writers/editors to build PCMag’s cachet on the social network. But the staff’s tweeting runs the gamut. Brian Heater (@bheater) has a feed full of non-sequiter jokes–no tech stuff at all. Sascha Segan (@saschasegan) and Cisco Cheng (@ciscoc) are, in my opinion, some of the best tech tweeters, providing their followers with all kinds of good info.
But that’s only one approach to the Twitter issue, and it’s too early to say if it’s the right one. Would PCMag be better served by keeping all those writers locked up and making them supply that info for publishing on the PCMag web site/blogs? I don’t think so, but perhaps. Would they have a right to enforce such a policy? Of course. After all, Twitter is, in some respects, a competing publishing platform.
Lastly, TechCrunch’s bloggers always seem unable to grasp the idea that not every news outlet can be or should be or wants to be just like TechCrunch, and that there’s a need for different news outlets with different goals and models. I’m glad TechCrunch does what it does, and it does it well; but we need some WaPos and some NYTs and some PCMags too.
Update: I meant to include this story from Mashable, about Texas Tech football telling the players to stop tweeting after a couple of them said negative things about the team and head coach. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
I think the big problem I have with WaPo is it pretends like none of its reporters ever have an opinion. I'd say they should instead ackwnowledge their opinions through twitter or other means, making it easier for people to decide whether the opinions are floating into the reporting or not.
You may not like John Stossel, but at least you know where he stands.
Yeah, but journalists, like judges, are paid to be impartial. That's baked into the job description–it's the essence of the profession. Why not let federal judges tweet? I'm sure they have very informed opinions on the cases they hear.
As an editor in a much, much lesser market, this is a prevailing issue as social networking evolves. Because I am somewhat in the public eye, I have to be ever cautious of how I portray myself in the wide world, but my magazine benefits greatly by the fact that I put myself out there in hopefully positive ways.
I think there’s a fine balance that has to be maintained between the personal and the professional, but the more “the powers that be” try to limit us, the more difficult it becomes to “police.” In my industry, a major manufacturer attempted to control the content its demonstrators posted on their blogs, and it completely backfired.
I think it comes down to the fact that no matter what your profession, if you are representing a certain standard and you provide some kind of service to the public (professional athlete, teacher, actor, judge, journalist, etc.), you will always have to balance your public persona with your private self, and hope that you are representing both with as much honesty and integrity as possible.
Thanks for that, Cath. Definitely good points.