THE WASHINGTON POST, among the most respected newspapers in the world, recently issued guidelines to their staffers saying they had to be careful about posting opinions on their facebook and twitter feeds.Here is a snippet:
"Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything – including photographs or video – that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility."
In an era of branding journalists and journalists providing behind the scenes looks at the news, is it a smart thing to water down the attitude? Is this old school thinking? Could it lose audience for the Post?
Or are the Post bigshots right in keeping opinions away from the public, even in the form of informal social media?
Are you over facebook and twitter?
10 comments:
Im too over Facebook. Twitter will be out before I know it.
The Post is totally justified. They're a well-respected world renown newspaper. Save the opinions for the Op-Ed page. If their correspondents feel the need to editorialize off the record and on the Twitter feed, they can do it in private to an audience of their choosing by "protecting" their tweets and checking that all important box in the account settings tab.
I think facebook and twitter have caused an immense watering-down of journalism, at least in the US. The rules are definitely justified.
While at home over the weekend I was watching CNN International. Unlike its US equivalent, neither facebook nor twitter were mentioned or even alluded to in the 2 1/2 hours I watched. They're both used as marketing ploys.
i dont think i really agree with it...if their great journalists they should be able to post their own opinions on the internet and still be able to write for the news completely unbiased
I think they should be able to do what ever they want. I understand if the can't post opinions through their publications social network, but on their time it's their life.
Tweeting, posting, or getting something out there as fast as you can, should not be done. This is just a newer version of when the textbook talks about reporters rushing from the event to the camera to broadcast the news right away. There is no time to digest the information. Now regarding a reporter publishing an opinion, as others have said this should be limited to an Op-Ed section.
Bottom line is, journalists have to stay Unbiased. If they wanted to share their opinions with people, there are other ways of doing it.
I think that as a journalist when you report you are nothing therefore, the Washington post is right for setting these guidelines for their journalist.
I believe the Post is wrong in censoring their journalists' opinions. As long as you can differentiate between work and twitter, I do not see the harm being done. Besides, if these writers are being followed on twitter, it most likely means his or her followers are fans of their writing and want to hear more. Silencing their opinions is destroying free promotion for the Post's writers.
I, personally, think that twitter is not for journalists. Most things newsworthy can not be explained in a way satisfying to the consumer in 160 characters or less. When journalists try to cram what they feel is a newsworthy idea into a twitter update, they are just increasing their chances of miscommunication to the Nth degree. With so many people already slowly but surely starting to distrust the media and journalism as a whole, do we really need any more reasons for them to think that journalist are just a bunch of biased propagandists?
Like it or not, when you become a journalist, you work for a company that is very much in the public eye. That is not to say that you are not allowed to have opinions or voice those opinions, but you have to be very careful when doing so. More often than not, "tweets" are quick and spontaneous, such as Terry Moran's immediate twitter post that President Obama called Kanye West a jackass. Perhaps if he had just put that quote in his notes to consider mentioning in his story, he would have realized that it was not really relevant to anything else the President spoke about that night, and would have decided to exclude it, avoiding the massive storm of criticism and media coverage about the post that followed.
Twitter seems, to me, to be a useful tool for self-indulgent celebrities, and not much else. Yeah, sometimes its great to be able to see what kind of ice cream Ashton Kutcher got at Ben and Jerry's last week, but as far as normal people go, it is a glorified Facebook status update. We are slowly training our society to be less elaborative and more spontaneous, which is, in my opinion, not a good thing.
FELICIA TOPSALE SAYS................I have never been on facebook or twitter and really don't EVER intend to be. I'm too busy and hate computers as a social tool. I am tired though of people constantly assuming I am on one of the social networking sites. I try hard to NOT be part of the status quo and a lot of people join those sites just because other people are. If everyone jumped off a bridge.....I'm tired of hearing about what a person said on those sites on the news. In fact, social networking sites made me care a lot less about what was going on socially, especially for celebrities and those wanting to be.
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