Whiteout: the simple solution of a bygone age.
A recent Online News Association event in New York included a panel of New York Times representatives discussing the newspaper’s use of and policies concerning Twitter, as described in this eMediaVitals report:
“One of the best things the Times has done in the past few years is have a hands-off policy toward Twitter,” he said. “People screw up every once in awhile, but that’s OK. We have to be able to push the boundaries of what we can get away with.”Though Stelter’s noted personality still can’t creep up in a news story, on Twitter he has more freedom to blend news and personality in his tweets, particularly depending on the time of day. “More and more we program ourselves online the way that a [TV] network does,” he said.
This report caught my attention, as it seems to confirm in part some of my previous research (described here) with regard to journalism organizations’ policies toward their employees’ social media use.
In a paper I published on this topic, I suggested that organizations that trusted their employees to use their common sense and good judgment in using social media — as opposed to creating strict policies or screening social media content — would find the greatest success in maintaining journalists’ loyalty, allowing them to develop their own voices and brands online, and in empowering them to use social media successfully to represent the organization. As Liz Heron, the Times’ social media editor, stated at this panel, the paper’s lack of “draconian” policies “allowed us to blossom.”
But what about those occasional “screwups”? One social media innovation that could increase journalism organizations’ confidence in their employees’ free use of social media is the development of standardized, simple correction methods. I agree with those who argue that incorrect tweets should not simply be deleted, but the problem remains that leaving inaccurate information out there in the Twitter stream is misleading. Twitter does not currently provide a way to edit an earlier tweet (and merely editing a tweet is not a transparent practice), yet users might miss a “correction tweet” that came later in the stream.
It would be great to see an error-correction function added to Twitter, or some way of noticeably linking an erroneous tweet to an update/correction tweet. Something similar to the Post Revision Display plugin for WordPress would be a great option. If we had this sort of function, an erroneous tweet could be marked with a message: something like “You are viewing a tweet that has been corrected or updated. Please click here for more information.” (Some great posts on this issue are available from Craig Silverman here and here, and from Scott Rosenberg here.)
Empowering journalists and others to spread corrected information just as widely and easily as an initial error would build journalism organizations’ confidence in allowing journalists to reach out to audiences more freely online — while also building public confidence in Twitter as a news source.
