Twitter is great until it isn’t: The New York Times
Another interesting take on newsroom Twitter policies (a topic that J-Source looked at last week) comes from David Carr’s Sunday column for The New York Times.
Another interesting take on newsroom Twitter policies (a topic that J-Source looked at last week) comes from David Carr’s Sunday column for The New York Times.
Carr explains that Roland Martin was suspended by CNN, the network for which he is a political analyst, for tweets that he wrote during the Superbowl that some have flagged as homophobic. And as Carr writes, “This is not the first time someone who makes a living on one platform has been clobbered for making remarks on another.” He explains:
The great thing about Twitter is it offers a friction-free route to an audience — if it can be thought, it can be posted. That’s also the bad thing about Twitter. For employees of almost any company, but especially media companies, it creates an ongoing tension: Yes, build your personal brand and, by proxy, bring social media luster to your employer, but do it in ways that are consumer-friendly and taste-appropriate. That kind of contemplativeness is not generally a Twitter impulse, as Mr. Martin found out.
The idea that media personalities and journalists can mess up on Twitter is not a new one – it’s precisely the reason why many newsrooms have implemented social media policies. However, Carr also explains that there is an inherent difference between Tweeting and reporting. A Twitter post, he says is more or less “a thought burped up,” whereas, while writing a column he solicits opinions and ideas from others – something he would “never do as a precursor to tweeting.”
[node:ad]Obviously with such a new medium, there are kinks to work out. In December, Steph Brooks looked into the fact that Twitter can make for lazy journalism on J-Source.
Check out Carr’s column in its entirety here.
