Why it’s OK for journalists to be human on Twitter
Sky News has issued a new policy that restricts how employees use their personal Twitter accounts, The Guardian reports. Sky News staff can no longer retweet rival journalists or post news updates outside their own beats. An email to staff explains, “Always pass breaking news lines to the news desk before posting them on social media networks” with the goal “to ensure that our journalism is joined up across platforms.”
On its surface, that may sound like a good strategy, but the distributed world of journalism has changed the game. For example, take Neal Mann, a journalist who has broken many stories on his personal Twitter account, ranging from Libya and Egypt to the London riots. He’s best known as @fieldproducer, amassing nearly 40,000 followers in his role as digital media editor at Sky News. We’ve retweeted and linked him several times on BreakingNews. His fast, distributed style of social reporting has made him the face of Sky News on Twitter — or as one journalist put it, “No one has promoted the Sky News brand on twitter better than @fieldproducer.”
There’s something to that idea. The International Journal of Communication conducted an in-depth study that looked at how people responded to Twitter reports from news brands and journalists during Arab Spring. TheNextWeb summarizes, “While all major mainstream media outlets have a strong presence on Twitter, some with millions of followers, when it comes to how information spreads through Twitter – when it’s coming from personal, individual accounts, it is likely to reach a larger audience.”
Humanizing our own @breakingnews account is one of our priorities, and we openly encourage our editors to freely tweet on their own accounts by pointing out other reporting, providing context and openly engaging with people who have questions or concerns. We’d like our editors to be known as experts in breaking news, and expertise thrives beyond the confines of a single news organization’s reporting. In social media, old broadcast rules do not apply. And it’s OK to be human.(Written by @corybe)
