It’s hard to measure such things, but it appears that one of the most circulated future-of-news blog items this week is Leah Betancourt’s Mashable entry How Social Media is Radically Changing the Newsroom [768 Retweets, 202 Delicious bookmarks].
Betancourt, digital community manager for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, covers ground familiar to those who follow the social media/journalism scene: Recent controversies, newsroom managers’ comments, common-sense rules, etc.
Two items stood out.
- The Society of Professional Journalists is not contemplating updating its code of ethics to accommodate newsroom use of social media.
- The Roanoke Times News is a leader in the profession, having crafted an impressive newsroom social media policy. Much of it represents basic journalistic hygiene. But it includes a few acute pointers:
Why?
SPJ Ethics Committee chair Andy Schotz explains that the core principles are, essentially, platform neutral: “I think there’s ample guidance in the code as it is,” he said. “The concepts are most important, not the medium or the technology.”
Don’t flack yourself. Take care not to sensationalize or misrepresent your article in a Tweet to promote it.
Contain your Facebook enthusiasms. What could appear an innocuous thumbs-up of [say] a local restaurant could later on be taken as evidence of bias in a story you’re reporting.
Betancourt of course follows this stuff closely.
Her Twitter feed recently featured a link to this Read/Write/Web provocation: Are Trolls Ruining Social Media? In the post author Sarah Perez discusses how online anonymity enables bad behavior on the social web, and wonders aloud whether something needs to be done to “force the trolls out into the light.”
Check out the comments: 44 at last count, many of them a hoot. None anonymous.
Pseudononymous? That’s another question.
Conversation Stopper
Emerson College journalism professor Jerry Lanson really flipped down the gauntlet in an op-ed appearing on the Christian Science Monitor website that argues journalism is failing due to reporters’ arrogance, elitism and dullness. (And that’s just by the second paragraph.) He calls for journalists to “reclaim their populist roots” and connect directly with readers.
That could have triggered a great online discussion about the future of journalism.
Alas: the Christian Science Monitor website does not permit reader comments.
And Finally
Andrew Keen, author of the anti-social-web jeremiad The Cult of the Amateur, has signed a new book deal with St. Martin’s Press, tentatively titled Digital Vertigo: Inequality, Anxiety and Isolation in the Social Media Age.
He announced this to his 6,924 followers on Twitter.
