Reuters' Social Media Policy and Twitter
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Reuters advises journal
ists not to break stories on Twitter in their new social media policy that was released Wednesday. Reuters wants news to be broken on the wire first.
This is only one of the stipulations of Reuters' social media policy. It is also suggested that journalists seek approval from managers to use Twitter for professional purposes and having a peer double-check tweets before posting . Reuters also encourages journalists to have two separate Twitter accounts, one for private use and one for professional.
Reuters claims that thi
s a way to keep a journalists personal biased out of the news, but is it really? Maybe it is more the fact that if more news is tweeted first and then published officially later, less people will go to Reuters' Web site to read the whole story. In this day and age, losing readers to Twitter is something that no news organizations cannot afford to do.
2 comments:
Lovely story. Makes me think that the monks would have told Gutenberg: "Hey, don't invent the printing press. It'll be bad for us." Somehow, I doubt Gutenberg would have listened to them.
If they were smart they'd use this to their advantage instead of trying to run away from it. All it takes is a link to Reuters website and simply stating "Check back here for updates" when you first break the news. I think it's more important to get the news out first, then have people come back for your article later. At least then your audience will remember they heard it from you first.
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