By Bianca Cseke
Your tweets can get you fired if you’re a journalist.
That’s more or less the warning most reporters receive at least once while in journalism school and when they begin working in a newsroom.
It certainly became reality for Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez in January after basketball player Kobe Bryant’s death, when she tweeted a link to a story about sexual assault allegations against him. The paper’s editor, Marty Baron, sent her an email citing her “real lack of judgment in tweeting this.” Sonmez was briefly suspended from work before editors reversed their decision, but her post is still under investigation to determine if it violated the paper’s social media policies.
News organizations have a myriad of expectations for their reporters regarding social media, especially Twitter, and much of it can seem contradictory and impossible to follow. Be engaging and show your personality, but don’t post anything you wouldn’t want published in the paper itself. Avoid showing a bias, to the point of “aggressively managing” friends’ and followers’ comments on your posts, Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism says.
It can be hard to realize that being a journalist means giving up some of the rights and privileges others have, like posting political opinions online, but it is no different than traditional guidelines about not participating in protests or putting political candidates’ signage up.
In fact, not only is it the same principle, but it could be even more important given how so many people get their news nowadays: through social media. If journalists are to be considered reputable, fair sources, their online presence should reflect that.
Beyond the inability to have a separate, personal life online, some journalists have pushed back at the notion that Twitter helps journalists and journalism itself. In early 2019, New York Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote that “Twitter is ruining American journalism,” saying that the platform prizes image over substance and ruins journalism’s image. He calls it “the epicenter of a nonstop information war,” “an almost comically undermanaged gladiatorial arena where activists and disinformation artists and politicians and marketers gather to target and influence the wider media world.”
As serious an issue as online disinformation may be, pessimism about the interconnectedness of journalism and social media ignores the fact that it helps news organizations reach a wider audience – and often much faster – than if they simply put their content on their websites and expect the public to find that content on its own. It succumbs to a mindset in which news organizations are the gatekeepers to information and readers will simply accept this, regularly checking to see what those few individuals have to say. That’s not how readers in the digital age behave and that mindset also does not bring important information readers may not even know they want or need to them.
It is the sacred duty of journalists to listen to the public they serve, City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis writes. It is also vital to bring journalistic value to the public conversation. With so much of the public on social media, discussing current affairs – sometimes seriously, sometimes not – it would be misguided for journalists not to participate on these platforms to engage with their communities.
That’s not to say journalists should base all of their reporting on what people say they want or only consider perspectives found on a single platform. A Columbia Journalism Review study found that making the use of Twitter a routine part of news production influences news judgment. Spending more time on the platform makes tweets feel equally newsworthy as information found outside of social media. While communities can provide useful insight into what to cover, others can take advantage of the platform to spin their message. Journalists can feed into that cycle of reporting on officials’ tweets and treating all of them as newsworthy. It explains why nearly every time President Donald Trump tweets, reporters write stories about what was tweeted out, even if it is unclear what his administration plans to do.
Journalists should exercise the same caution online as they do in more traditional reporting, like verifying information and people’s identities, as well as carefully considering what audiences want to see published versus what they need to see because the information is so important for a well-functioning community.
And as much as some journalists will complain about having to utilize social media to promote themselves and their work, and as much as they resent not being able to have a completely private life separate from their work online, it is journalism’s duty to make sure important information worth reporting about in the first place reaches the communities it impacts.