Reporters on Twitter

Maybe even before I had a Twitter account I was aware of the fact that quite a number of reporters and media types were making use the aforementioned service. As I have spent time on Twitter I have seen that reporters frequently use the service to do such this as promote stories, cover events live, or seek information from fellow users. All of these uses, and more that I can't think of, seem like pretty reasonable uses of Twitter by members of the media. Actually, that there are so many reporters doing things like this on Twitter is one of the reasons that I am so fond of the service. Particularly during election campaigns I have found this entertaining as one might have the ability to simultaneously hear about the daily campaign events of the competing parties as they make their way through the campaign.

But it seems that one major consequence of the fact that Twitter makes the provision of content so easy is that editors are no longer involved in filtering the content of these reporters. Content is going directly from the reporter to the consumer (often times this information seems to be accompanied by more editorializing than one might find in the accounts that are eventually published).

Consequently, many reporters in their Twitter profiles suggest that their tweets don't represent the views of their employer, or something to that effect. They, to at least some extent, are trying to separate their Twitter content from the content provided by their employer.

Of course this separation seems to be only partial at best, and sometimes veering towards misleading. Not only is the connection between the media organization and the reporter made apparent by such disclaimers, but in many cases it is the connection that brings their account it's sense of legitimacy. Furthermore, the reporter has access to the content they are tweeting about only because they are reporters working for their employer. And it should also be noted that they are typically covering stories on Twitter that they have been assigned to cover by their employer.

I think that it is also worth pointing out that these reporters are tweeting about these stories on work time, and probably with work phones. Given that these actions are accessible to the public it seems reasonable to assume that the reporters who are engaging in this behaviour are doing so with the support (and possibly encouragement) of their employers.

Another practice that seems common, particularly among CBC reporters, is to include some form of the network name in their Twitter handle. This further blurs the boundary between the individual's private persona and their media persona and arguably undermines the believability of the profile disclaimers claiming that they don't speak as a representative of their employer.

I guess I generally feel that if you don't want your comments to be attributed to you as the employee of a particular enterprise don't make a point of highlighting your relationship to that enterprise and don't use an supposedly private Twitter to report and comment on things that you are simultaneously being paid to report and comment on.

As things stand now, I think it is hard not to see many reporter's tweets as extensions of the media services for which they work. If reporters or media agencies aren't keen on this public perception they will need to work harder to find ways to clearly differentiate the private and sanctioned web 2.0 content of their employees.