This is a hot topic lately. This week, both Sky News and the BBC journalists were officially told by their organizations not to break news via Twitter before writing something for work.
The Guardian reports:
The new BBC guidelines are intended to ensure that stories are fed into the BBC’s newsgathering machine as quickly as possible and without the delay of a 140-character update on Twitter.
“We’ve been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter,” said Chris Hamilton, the BBC’s social media editor. (Read source)
Don’t believe it? Read a notice on BBC.co.uk yourself.
The notice says that when journalists have “breaking news, an exclusive or any kind of urgent update on a story, they must get written copy into our newsroom system as quickly as possible, so that it can be seen and shared by everyone.”
The wording of the Sky News policy change goes even further:
The new guidelines also warn Sky News journalists to “stick to your own beat” and not to tweet about non-work subjects from their professional accounts.
Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter. Such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process. (Read source)
Personally? I think this is all a bit much.
I completely get not wanting something to get out of control online before you have a word written down and get behind on deadline.
But isn’t it sort of going backwards if we can’t tweet something at least semi-immediately as news happens? I find especially Twitter is a good spot for gathering news — a fast-moving news feed on a hot topic could cripple your computer some days.
Other news outlets and citizens are going to be tweeting and posting photos of news events, and if we fall too far behind doesn’t that make our tweets kind of pointless? Like we’re tweeting what everyone already knows, or something. We can always post “more to come” and “we are working to confirm whatever details.”
But, then again, some people might call that sloppy. Like the least we could do is get a comment from police about something (as if that’s always easy) before we tweet it out to the world. Does this method just invite more errors and future apologies to readers?
To me, news happens so fast it seems silly to insist on written notice of breaking news before sharing it with readers. Maybe spoken notice, but written?
And sticking to your own beat? I can see how that might be useful, but a lot of reporters I know have merged their personal and professional lives on Twitter. So, you’re telling them to create a professional feed that will likely only be used during 9-5 and get stale fairly quick? Hmm.
Maybe I’m all wrong. What do you think?
