To tweet or not to tweet? Tweet now or tweet later? Oh, those modern dilemmas. The Twitter policies of the UK’s two main TV news networks have been in the spotlight this week after both Sky and the BBC issued new guidelines to their journalists about how they use the micro-blogging platform.
The BBC’s new guidelines focus on priorities when big news stories are breaking, or their journalists score exclusives, while Sky’s new rulings go further, barring its staff from retweeting news updates from rival organisations and making comments outside the areas they report on for the news channel.
All kinds of companies are still grappling with their Twitter policies, though for media organisations there are extra concerns about the tweets of their big name reporters, partly because they often circumvent the sort of editorial checks other output linked to the news operation would go through, and partly because if and when that reporter moves to a rival they will have a direct line to a chunk of their former employer’s audience via the social media service.
The BBC insist that they value greatly the role Twitter now plays in their operations, but say that they don’t want tweeting to hinder the provision of breaking news stories to viewers tuned in via their core channels, in particular the BBC News Channel.
The Beeb’s Chris Hamilton wrote yesterday: “We prize the increasing value of Twitter, and other social networks, to us (and our audiences) as a platform for our content, a news-gathering tool and a new way of engaging with people. Being quick off the mark with breaking news is essential to that mission. We’re fortunate to have a technology that allows our journalists to transmit text simultaneously to our newsroom systems and to their own Twitter accounts. But we’ve been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter”.
Sky’s new guidelines went much further, and the restrictions on retweeting have been seen by some as a misunderstanding of one of the more important elements of the social network – curation and recommendation – though Sky News say their new RT rule isn’t based on concerns that their staff might promote competitors, but rather that any third party sites linked to won’t have been vetted by the firm’s editorial processes.
Make of that what you will. It will be interesting to see what impact the new Twitter regulations have on the output of BBC and Sky journalists’ Twitter feeds, and the number of followers they enjoy.
Tags: BBC, BSkyB, Sky News, Twitter
Sections: Digital - Media - News-Bite | No Comments
