Since everyone is on Twitter, we have to let journalists tweet away, unrestrained, writes Stephen J.A. Ward. But as newsrooms start to create editorial policies for social media, we need sober, nuanced, ethical thinking that takes the long view, not emotional arguments from social media enthusiasts.

Swimming in the roiling sea of online journalism, increasing numbers of newsrooms have decided to take up the challenge of articulating editorial policies for social media.

Over the past year, news organizations from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to the BBC have issued protocols for staff on Facebook, Twitter, and personal blogs and web sites.

The guidelines spark debate.

Recently, The Washington Post came under fire for formulating “restrictive” guidelines, after managing editor Raju Narisetti expressed on his Twitter page strong views about war spending and term limits for politicians.

Reading the guidelines and the opinions of their critics is instructive. It shows how to construct a social media ethics for mainstream journalism.  Here are some lessons I’ve learned.

The first step is to understand the place of guideline writing in journalism ethics.

The guidelines should be applications of general ethical principles. The issue is not only about giving individual journalists the freedom to participate in new media. It is not about how, since everyone is on Twitter, we have to let journalists tweet away, unrestrained.

It’s about something bigger.

It’s about how social media should be used to contribute to responsible, democratic journalism. Guidelines should not be ad hoc “fixes” to a particular problem. We need sober, nuanced, ethical thinking that takes the long view, not emotional arguments from social media enthusiasts.

Taking the big picture

 The task is to articulate rules with two features:

(a)  Flexible rules that encourage new media
In this developing area of ethics, guideline writing should be experimental in spirit, viewed as a work in progress. Avoid a hectoring or absolute tone.

(b) Rules that are consistent with a plurality of ethical principles
Guidelines should be evaluated according to how well they honour or violate the principles of journalism as a whole. A common mistake is to argue from only one principle. For example, critics who reject the very idea of social media guidelines often invoke free speech rights. They don’t mention that journalism ethics also recognizes the principle of journalistic independence, which insists on the avoidance of conflicts of interests and perceived conflicts.

Guideline writing, like journalism ethics as a whole, must weigh the conflicting principles of freedom, independence, minimizing harm, and being accountable.

Taking the right approach

The policy of The New York Times contains guidelines that follow this approach.

The policy stresses the “remarkably useful reporting tools” of social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Then the Times policy warns:
1. People will use what journalists write, and the online groups they join, to undermine their credibility. Journalists should, for example, leave blank the Facebook section that asks for the user’s political views.

2. Be careful not to write on a blog or a personal Web page what “you could not write in The Times – don’t editorialize, for instance, if you work for the News Department.”

3. Be careful about your Facebook “friends.” Journalist could show impartiality in the areas that they report on. For example, a political reporter could have “friends” in both the Democratic and Republican parties.  

The Times’ approach is open to social media, yet suggests reasonable restraints consistent with journalistic principles. It warns about pitfalls.  This is the right strategy.

Taking the wrong approach

Do I have an example of the incorrect approach? I do. Consider the rigid guidelines on social media established in May by The Wall Street Journal. One rule stated: “Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.” Another guideline was: “Don’t discuss articles that haven’t been published, meeting you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted.”

 This guideline writing ignores both (a) and (b) above. The idea that journalists not comment in any manner on stories or their news organization is too sweeping. It runs against the grain of social media and its love of collaboration and transparency. However, since all organizations need to keep some information confidential, what is needed is a more specific set of protocols that lists the situations that demand confidentiality, such as the protection of sources.

The BBC’s approach to blogs and confidentiality is better that that of the Journal’s.

The BBC acknowledges that reporters use blogging to discuss their BBC work in ways that benefit the BBC and add to the “industry conversation.” Its editorial policies are “not intended to restrict this, as long as confidential information is not revealed. Blogs or websites which do not identify the blogger as a BBC employee, do not discuss the BBC and are purely about personal matters would normally fall outside this guidance.” If a blog makes it clear that the author works for the BBC, it should include a simple and visible disclaimer such as “these are my personal views and not those of the BBC.”

The Times, the BBC and other newsrooms are pioneering social media ethics for mainstream media. Their efforts, while not perfect, show that it is possible to develop norms for responsible online journalism.

The development of reasonable guidelines should be sustained against the libertarians of the Net who reject any rules and hidebound conservatives who accept only traditional norms.

Journalists who take on the often thankless task of developing guidelines should ignore the skeptics and push on with this remarkable reinvention of journalism ethics.

The future of responsible journalism depends on it.

Stephen J. A. Ward is the James E. Burgess Professor of Journalism Ethics in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He is the founding chair of the Canadian Association of Journalists’ (CAJ) ethics advisory committee and former director of  UBC’s Graduate School of Journalism.

I am pretty sure we are still in a bubble phase.

It’s a bubble of bubbles world we now live in.

Since the 80’s we have been printing money and printing money leads to bubbles. Persistently low interest rates leads to bubbles. It is obviously intoxicating for governments to just ‘ease baby ease’. It’s Pavlovian monetary policy.

Under this policy, bankers have evolved like cockroaches, using technology in ever more creative (some would say evil) ways to protect themselves and create the ILLUSION of value like never before.

Since we have done little to protect the consumer from the ‘Too Big to Fail’ companies, and the bankers who have now learned marketing, we will inevitably get soaked in another financial bubble in the not too distant future.

While I may not chase the ‘Too Big To Fail’ dream of world dominance, a bazillion others in the ‘BRIC’ will. They are getting a taste of freedom AND money. They are 50 years behind the US roadmap and eerily copying it – just exponentially faster. Imagine where they are in the GREED lifecycle. It’s banker heaven.

It is too hard and aggravating for me to invest a sizable percentage of my portfolio in this corrupted and broken ‘Too Big To Fail’ stock market environment. You know my major themes based on the macro picture.

There is one bubble that I do not fear…the social web/social leverage bubble. It will inflate and get silly, but thousands upon thousands of profitable niches will show themselves.

My journey in the social web started in 2005 when I looked up the term ‘Term Sheet’ on Google while drafting one up for Golfnow.com. I discovered Brad Feld’s blog and Fred Wilson’s blog. I started my own blog on Google Blogger and wrote like a madman. Nobody was listening. As niches from Twitter, Stocktwits and other microblogging platforms expand, the speed to an audience will accelerate for the talented.

It will be years of rolling up/aggregating and years of discovery for the adventurous.

It will be a seemingly endless wave and if you position yourself accordingly, businesses will show up that carry you along to wealth you could never have imagined (wealth is not just money).

I watch it happen for people that get discovered every day on blogs, twitter, and Stocktwits…LIGHTBULBS clicking on, relationships sparking, matches being made, brains being leveraged. It has happened always as the world has shrunk, but never this fast and never this simply.

Enjoy the fact that it is impossible to value and ridiculed.

via howardlindzon.com

We’re always hearing about what an incredible tool Twitter can be, particularly when dealing with real-time events – before Twitter, there was never such an incredibly effective way to track trends, news and events as they happen. In a world where things happen at a faster and faster pace, tools like Twitter are going to become indispensable as we move forward into the future.

Not convinced? Here’s five wickedly clever ways to use Twitter:

1. Real-Time Customer Service.

When customers have a problem with the companies they give their business to, they have that problem now. The problem is, the traditional technical support structure that’s arisen isn’t particularly good at getting things done now. It’s very good at making you wait listening to irritating hold music designed to relax you but which, in fact, only infuriates you further. It’s very good at explaining to you that it can’t personally help you, but if you’d be willing to tell your whole sad story again to a different representative, that representative might be able to help you. Neither of these things is going to endear a customer to a business; indeed, customer service complaints are the single largest reason why customers switch over to competitors.
Comcast figured this out, and created its now-famous Comcast Cares Twitter account, which watches Twitter for complaints about Comcast and its services and engages those unsatisfied customers directly and immediately, often dealing with hundreds of issues each day. The program has been wildly successful and has breathed new life into the beleaguered telecommunications company, which previously had a reputation for terrible customer service.

When a company doesn’t engage in real-time, proactive customer support, they fall into the risk of having their customers stolen right out from under them while they’re still struggling to mount a customer service response through traditional channels. High-competition industries monitor Twitter for complaints about a particular company or service, and then engage with those unsatisfied customers to convince them – when they’re most vulnerable to such convincing – to switch over to the competition. After recently complaining about my hosting provider, I was contacted within minutes by two competing companies, one of whom offered me a discount code specifically for Twitter users who were unsatisfied with the company I was currently using. If that’s not a wickedly clever use of Twitter, I’m not sure what is.

When the San Francisco area’s most famous (er, only) Korean BBQ Take-Out Truck rolls into the neighborhood, lines literally stretch around the block. But given the mobile nature of the business, how do people know when and where to find it? Enter Twitter. Kogi BBQ uses Twitter to let their customers know where they’re going to be each day, and if the photographs showing hundreds of people waiting in line for Korean BBQ To-Go are any indicator, it’s a business strategy that’s worked out incredibly well for them. The real-time nature of their business demands a real-time communications platform to underpin it, and Twitter (as well as Facebook) is the basis for that platform. Sandwich carts around the country should take note.

When it comes to learning a new language, there’s nothing like a real-life example. Byki Global realized this when they were designing their language-learning iPhone app; when users are learning a new word in a new language, they’re not only shown the meaning and pronunciation, but at the click of the iPhone button they can view a real-time Twitter feed of tweets containing the new vocabulary word in question – so they can see how real people are using the language that they’re learning. The global nature of Twitter means that people are constantly tweeting in many languages; Byki taps into the Twittersphere to compile the largest possible vocabulary usage list.

As anyone in market research can tell you, putting together a focus group can be a pretty monumental task, from selecting the participants to designing the questions to actually administering them, it’s an expensive job that takes up a lot of people’s time. It was, at least, until Twitter came around. Using Twitter’s advanced searching mechanisms, market researchers both big and small have access to the largest real-time focus group in human history – they can literally see what millions of people are saying about their product, in 100% real time. No more one-way mirrors – Twitter is the new ad-hoc focus group.

These are just five examples of the incredibly clever ways that people have come up with to use Twitter. The possibilities are truly endless, as more and more users join Twitter each day bringing their ideas with them.

Want to share your fiendishly clever use of Twitter? Leave it in our comments and let’s get the discussion started!

The last time I took a written test, I found myself very frustrated. I was sitting by myself in a room, answering questions on a sheet of paper, cut off from the large network of people I have digitally gathered around me over the years. The questions were testing my knowledge, not how I could put knowledge to use with the help of my extended social networks, which, practically, is how I would solve the problem. We are increasingly living in a world where our general understanding of things is more important than the particular details we can remember; we are using our brains more to make sketches of how things work and letting things like Google and our social networks fill in the blanks. Rather than spending time memorizing, we are jumping up the ladder and processing meaning and use. We expand our understanding knowing that the details will come via our always-on internet connections.

And this is why your social networks are important. You store information in your social networks, in the people you trust and communicate with. One of your friends reads a lot of historical novels; when you need to know the name of Henry VIII’s second wife, you can ask him. Or you can just Google it. You don’t need to store that name in your grey matter. You know you don’t need to; you know Henry VIII had a second wife. And that’s largely enough. Your friend would be happy to chat with you about English history, and when your friend stumbles into an area you’re interested in, you’re happy to chat with him about that. Reciprocal information-sharing. Two heads are better than one!

Step one in creating and using a social network is to acknowledge that it’s there. Asking a friend is something they let you do on TV game shows, but we often don’t see that knowledge network as real or valuable in our professional lives. But it’s probably the biggest asset we have. Your social network is your living library. You are part of other people’s living libraries. One of the best things you can do is to contribute to your network when they need your obscure knowledge and educated opinion. Engage with your network; provide ideas, thoughts, where required. Let your network shine by employing your knowledge. Then you can do the same.

I would comfortably posit that people at certain stages in their lives don’t have functionally useful networks. This might be because your network isn’t comfortable in its knowledge yet, or that knowledge isn’t yet solidified, or that the individuals in your network haven’t had a chance yet to set out on its own and develop knowledge and experience independent of their peers. If everyone in your network reads the same books, has similar summer jobs, and lives in the same town, that network isn’t going to be terribly useful to you. So branch out a bit: cultivate difference. Embrace it. Share your experiences. Become expert at something. It doesn’t have to be something lofty; it could be about gardening in a micoclimate, or knitting, or the history of a pop band, or the works of Margaret Atwood, or doing laundry. Become the go-to person. Everyone has expertise in something; if we pool all that expertise together, we get a really interesting resource that makes us all better people.

I’ve found that the deeper I dig into my passion (which is my work: internet apps in academia), the more obscure my knowledge and expertise gets. And so does that of my friends and my peers. So my networks have become really interesting and rich. I know that if I announce an opinion on a social network (facebook, twitter, my blog, etc.), I will surely get some diverse responses. Because the people I care about are coming from so many different spaces, I am enriched by interacting with them.

We largely categorize this kind of interaction as “social” and therefore “fun” and therefore “not work/serious”. But interacting with our networks is often the key that opens up whole new worlds for us. Our friends and our peers shape us, just as much as official, serious education and information do (likely far more). Let’s just acknowledge that while our friends are great and fun and we blow off steam with them and have fun with them, they are still valid sources of information and growth for us. Often when we’re working on a thorny problem, and have a few IM windows open, and Twitter, and Facebook, and are composing a blog post, we’re not just messing around on the internet. It might be fun, it might be building our friendships, it might look like we’re not paying proper attention, but in actual fact we are learning and processing and drawing on the collective knowledge of our networks. Even pure socializing, pure “not-work”, is part of building a real and useful social network. We are laying the groundwork to trust and share with our peers.

So: is it a bad thing to have facebook open at work? It can be if it’s distracting you from getting something done. I remember back at library school everyone would open up their IM clients and complain about the assignment we all had due. It can distract, it can act as the thing you do instead of doing what you need to do. Or, we can use these tools to build ourselves. We can use them as our interactive library. The thing itself isn’t the problem; it’s how we use it.

This is largely why I like to share what I’m thinking about or experiencing via social networks. I know that many of my friends and peers find it engaging and thought-provoking professionally, and I find the same when they share their work with me. I get to benefit from their learning when they share it. My professional development expands via sharing. When I attend an event about a subject I’m only passingly familiar with, I go to that event with the collective knowledge of my network, who correct my assumptions and add colour to the details I learn.

So embrace your social network. Cultivate it. add to it the people who challenge and inspire you. Let your network build you into the sort of person you want to be, and return the favour.

The New York Times plans to eliminate 100 newsroom jobs — about 8 percent of the total — by year’s end, offering buyouts to union and non-union employees, and resorting to layoffs if it cannot get enough people to leave voluntarily, the paper announced on Monday.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The program mirrors one carried out in the spring of 2008, when the paper erased 100 positions in its newsroom, though other jobs were created, so the net reduction was smaller. That round of cuts included some layoffs of journalists — about 15 to 20, though The Times would not disclose the actual figure — which was the first time in memory that had happened.

The paper has made much deeper reductions in other, non-newsroom departments, where layoffs have occurred several times. But the advertising drop that has pummeled the industry has forced cuts in the news operation as well. The newsroom already has lowered its budgets for freelancers and trimmed other expenses, and employees took a 5 percent pay cut for most of this year.

Nearly all papers in the metropolitan region have been cutting their news operations for years, and some have fewer than half as many people in their newsrooms as they did in 2000.

The Times’s news department peaked at more than 1,330 employees before the last round of cuts. The current headcount is about 1,250; no other American newspaper has more than about 750.

The Times will mail buyout packages to the entire newsroom staff on Thursday. The employees have 45 days to decide whether to apply for the buyout. Under the Newspaper Guild contract that covers most newsroom employees, buyouts generally offer three weeks’ salary for each year of service.

In a note to the news staff, Bill Keller, the executive editor, wrote: “As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs. I hope that won’t happen, but it might.”

“I won’t pretend that these staff cuts will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation,” he wrote, adding, “Like you, I yearn for the day when we can do our jobs without looking over our shoulders for economic thunderstorms.”

Times executives said this year that they did not anticipate the news staff shrinking in 2009, except through attrition, but that nothing was certain. In fact, the 5 percent pay cut was meant to forestall any staff reductions.