When should journalists use branded social media accounts? Or individual accounts?

When should journalists use their personal social media accounts and when should they use the branded newsroom accounts?

An editor raised those issues in an email (edited lightly to avoid identification, because I welcome private requests for help, even though I sometimes address the issues publicly):

Some of my staff members — copy editors who also do reporting — have been finding that crowdsourcing on our newsroom’s Facebook and Twitter accounts has been very useful, as would be expected. But, at times, they say, there can be so many reporters and editors doing it that their questions get lost in a sea of posts, all of which are almost always quality. They say they sometimes can have better luck posting crowdsourcing questions to their private Twitter and Facebook accounts, which means their sources have been gravitating toward those accounts and not the official branded accounts.

A concern raised among some editors is that these private accounts don’t give our official sites the hits and exposure they could if the groundwork was done through the official accounts. In addition, the private accounts and all the new followers staffers generate through their work here would go with the staffer should they leave.

It’s hard to find a best practice for how other papers handle this. This harkens back to the day when reporters on the cutting edge of technology initially used their private email accounts before newspapers caught on and got people their own company email account.

Anyway, I hear wisdom on both sides. Just wondering if you had thoughts that you wouldn’t mind sharing. Hope that isn’t asking too much. I read your blog routinely and find it very helpful and interesting.

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Reviewing a year’s blogging

Reviewing 2009 on my blog (mostly for my own information, but I share it because that’s what bloggers do):

My most popular post by far (more than twice as many views as anything else) was my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, posted April 27. I proposed a detailed new business model for community news organizations. It received more links from other blogs and more tweets than anything else I’ve written this year. And interest in C3 remains strong. (After traffic on that post declined from June through September, it increased in October and November. December didn’t quite match November, but exceeded August, September and October). C3 gets more attention in a slow month than my average post gets total.

Everyone wants a blog post to go viral, but I’m glad I didn’t write something quirky that went off the charts. C3 was one of the most important things I’ve written this year (or in my career), so I’m pleased that it received more attention than any other post. I’ve been invited to make presentations dealing with C3 in Florida, Nevada, California, Texas, Siberia and Canada. I hope in 2010 to be writing about how Gazette Communications and other organizations are carrying out the vision of C3.

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Storytellers are challenged, not limited, by Twitter and other digital tools

When I read Philip Lee’s ignorant anti-Twitter rant, Notes on the triviality of Twitter, my first reaction was that I needed to write another anti-anti-Twitter-rant rant.

But I’m getting tired of those rants (maybe you are, too). I previously noted how Leonard Pitts, Edward Wasserman and Paul Farhi wrote foolish things about Twitter without bothering to learn what they were talking about. Do I repeat myself just because Lee has echoed their whining, or could I find something new to say?

Lee did say lots of ignorant things about Twitter, but they are things I’ve addressed before, so I won’t dwell on them here. He has tried Twitter out (barely, 34 tweets in nearly a year), which the others noted above had not.

I want to address Lee’s concern about Twitter and storytelling:

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Yet another anti-Twitter piece written in ignorance

It’s OK to be sick and tired of Twitter rants by journalists who don’t understand it.

The same day I posted about Edward Wasserman writing about Twitter without really learning about it, I read another piece from another journalist I respect, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, writing The Twitter Explosion in the American Journalism Review. 

Farhi, to his credit, did a fairly thorough job of researching Twitter by reading about it online and by interviewing journalists who use it. He just didn’t bother, from what I can tell, to learn anything firsthand by actually using it. And his writing revealed his ignorance.

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Another Twitter expert who didn’t bother to learn

I have long been an admirer of Edward Wasserman’s work. When I was presenting a series of ethics seminars, Our Readers Are Watching, for the American Press Institute, I frequently recommended Wasserman’s Miami Herald columns on ethics in a list-serv for participants.

But his latest work shows how smart people can write stupid things when they don’t take the time to learn and understand the topic they are writing about. Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, clearly is smart. His thumbnail bio with his columns says he was educated at Yale, the University of Paris and the London School of Economics.

Apparently that meant Wasserman was so educated he didn’t have to learn anything first-hand about Twitter before writing about it. His latest column, How Twitter poses a threat to newspapers, revealed so much ignorance about Twitter that I knew without looking that he had never bothered to use Twitter. But I look anyway. It’s good journalism to do some research and see if your assumptions are correct. A quick check using Twitter’s “find people” function showed no Edward Wasserman on Twitter. (Update: Wasserman confirmed in an email response that he has not used Twitter. His response, which shows a refreshing humility and thick skin, is in the comments.)

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Understand Twitter before you write about it

Reluctantly I must tell you that Leonard Pitts was clueless when he wrote about Twitter.

One of the highlights of 2008 for many of us in The Gazette newsroom was the October day when Pitts visited. He was speaking in Iowa City and I asked him if he would swing by Cedar Rapids and spend some time with our staff, talking about writing and journalism and the issues of the day (it was the week before the election). He graciously agreed and we had a delightful time. He has long been one of my favorite columnists and I now consider him a friend — the way you call someone who was friendly to you a friend, even if you only met once or twice (I actually met Pitts earlier at a conference in Wichita).

So it is with some regret that I write here that Leonard Pitts didn’t do his homework when he dismissed Twitter as a waste of time.

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