For my final post for the semester I'd like to discuss a recent article I read in The Australian newspaper about the rules surrounding social media use that media outlets around Australia are implementing for their journalists to adhere to. You can view the article here.
Essentially the article discusses the various approaches and policies different media outlets are taking in light of their increasing use of social media.
Recently Fairfax Media have released 'dedicated policies that seek to clarify the do's and don't's of social media'. News Limited was also reviewing their policy surrounding social media use.
Internationally the BBC has a 'second pair of eyes' review policy, where every post and tweet related to news reports by a journalist must be reviewed by an editor first.
Given Australian journalist Catherine Deveny's sacking last year following her tirade of negative and inappropriate tweets at last year's Logie awards, it's no wonder media outlets are taking this issue very seriously.
But is this all a big Big Brother-ish? In particular if opinion writers are tweeting or blogging, does this need to be censored too, given they are paid to give an opinion (and often a controversial, headline-grabbing one?) Or are media outlets just being sensible and covering their backs?
Would love to hear what you all think! (No censoring I promise!)
This is an interesting area. When journalists are known to be outspoken, like Andrew bolt, then is twitter etc. Just an extent ion of their personality? The other thing that I question when it comes to news and social media, is whether comments made via sm a credible news source? Too often the media obsession with celebrity translates into 'news readers' making dramatic assumptions from a 140 character post and present this to the audience like it is actual news.
ReplyDeleteI would say media outlets are trying to just be creful. It a way, newsworthy items posted on SM is free, not being included in the newspaper mean the newspaper sales may go down. I wonder how many of these possible tweets are being stopped before even got to an SM platform?
ReplyDeleteI guess whenever you are displaying a connection with your employer, then you are also representing them too. Employees hold a bit of power to defame or cause economic loss to their employer if they are sharing sensitive information or expressing views that might compromise their employers. So of course employers can be a bit strict about what they expect of their affiliates. I guess this is more the case in the news/broadcasting industry, where some journo's have 'opinion leader' status... Why not just let the Deveny sacking set a precedent for anyone that gets caught expressing damaging views instead of having each communication approved? Tash
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