WSJ’s staff rules for using Twitter
I was tipped to this by my brother: The Wall Street Journal’s staff has gotten a memo from their deputy managing editor, telling them how to blog and use social media, including Twitter. There’s a big push on for this in the newspaper industry, and we’ve recently blown the dust off the Hesperia Star’s Twitter site, although it’s still not something I remember to do automatically.
(That’s party because of the need to open a second tab for TinyURL or a comparable site to create short links. It’d be nice if our content management software that we use to publish our Web stories would automatically create Twitter posts, complete with a TinyURL when a post was made.) (And, as some people know, I’m not wild about TinyURL-type services — I dislike the lack of transparency about where they lead, by default — but I accept the necessity of them on Twitter.)
Anyway, most of the rules are the obvious — don’t get into fights with readers, remember you’re always representing the company, don’t recruit shills or use a false name when discussing your stories, etc. — but there’s an odd one that I frankly just don’t get:
Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.
Really? OK, sure, don’t say “well, my story was awesome until it was edited into pablum,” but isn’t that covered under remembering that you represent the company? Maybe I’m missing something, but I think that a discussion of how you covered something, and why you made the choices that you did, is a pretty valid — and harmless — thing to discuss.
