Editor & Publisher reports that major papers have added social media guidelines to their codes of conduct for employees. Don’t friend confidential sources if you work at the Wall Street Journal. Don’t engage in “verbal fisticuffs with rivals or critics” if you’re at the Washington Post, nor use your Twitter account to “advance personal agendas.”
New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told staff to use common sense. “Even when they are tweeting personal information to their followers, they are still representing the New York Times,” Keller said.
I’m not hearing anything new. These social media guidelines are carbon copies of the ethics policy I received as a brand-new reporter at the Greeley Daily Tribune in 1989, and heard at every stop on my career path after that.
The bosses said, “You ARE the newspaper.” On and off the job, we represented the paper, and in exchange for a very small salary, we were expected to behave. Never use your connection to the paper to get a better price or fairer treatment. Don’t write about a stock you own, a team your kid plays on or the company where your spouse works. At the Rocky Mountain News, we were cordial to the competition in person. Then we made them look foolish in print – by beating them.
Frankly, I don’t worry about print reporters failing to see how the old rules apply to the new media. Instead, I wonder why I see online writers doing things that can get you fired at any reputable news organization: trolling for freebies, taking cheap shots at their enemies, lifting other people’s work, quoting anonymous sources and writing ad copy disguised as news or “thought leadership.”
Worse, some PR people encourage these tactics because they get hits for clients without those pesky ethical filters. By doing so, we trade short-term results for the long-term degradation of the work we do on the Web. If we want online media to develop into a reliable source of news, and not just one big banner ad, we must step up and encourage the same ethical standards that we expect when we open a newspaper or turn on TV or radio.
-Lisa Greim, Metzger Associates
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