Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » social media

Sky News Twitter restrictions – where do you stand?

Paul McNally — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:33:11 +0000

It started with a tweet from BBC News channel controller Kevin Bakhurst

I’m told #SkyNews have stopped their journos retweeting information/tweets from journalists or people not working for Sky. Must be wrong??

The guidelines, seen by the Guardian, state:

Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter. Such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process.

Don’t tweet when it’s someone else’s story. Stick to your own beat. Always pass breaking news lines to the news desk before posting them on social media networks.

Guardian reporter Josh Halliday said last night:

Sky News battening down hatches on this one. Told new guidelines are non-negotiable – how long will they last??

A hashtag campaign soon got under way to #savefieldproducer – Sky’s popular digital news editor Neal Mann, who has more than 40,000 followers on Twitter.

He replied:

Been a busy day, for those asking me questions about social media policy,I can’t really answer because I didn’t take part in the discussions

In a Reuters piece headlined “Sky News longs for Victorian internet, applies dark age social policy”, Anthony de Rosa writes:

These new rules will hamstring Neal and make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to continue to do what he did to garner so much appreciation from people like me. I suspect Sky will come to their senses and realize the error of their ways. If not, they’re going to lose one of their best ambassadors in Neal, and I would suspect many people working at Sky may wonder if they’re working for an organization that is writing policies that will drive them into obsolescence.

The FT’s Ben Fenton says competitors are likely to benefit:

Just as you never get good search-engine optimisation if you don’t link to outside sites, so anyone who steadfastly refuses to be anything but a puff factory for their own brand will gradually loses friends.

This step will also be likely to offer a competitive advantage to other news sources, such as ITV News or the BBC, enlightened enough to see beyond the blinkers of brand identity.

The move, does, however have some supporters. Sunny Hundal, on the Liberal Conspiracy blog, writes:

The ban on RTs makes sense if you acknowledge their worry that disputed links or info by their journalists could reflect on Sky News itself.

Is it any surprise editors at Sky News feel that a RT not meant as an endorsement could be interpreted in that way anyway? After all, people still attack me for publishing editorials on LC even if I disagree with those views. Once a Twitter mob gets going it’s very difficult to calm it down.

Of course this also implies Sky News editors don’t want to give their own journalists too much leeway in using their judgement. But all the broadcasters have hefty rule books for journalists (I expect the BBC will follow Sky), so this isn’t that surprising.

And Fleet Street Blues says the new policy has some logic to it:

It makes no sense for Sky News to pay journalists to break stories through another medium. It makes no sense for them to pay journalists to amass personal social media followings by promoting rival news outlets. And it makes no sense for them to pay journalists to report through a medium outside its own editorial controls.

Sky News said in a statement last night:

Sky News has the same editorial procedures across all their platforms including social media to ensure the news we report is accurate.

Rupert Murdoch replied this morning:

I have nothing to do with Sky NewsWhat do you make of the new policy? Is it enforceable? What effect might it have on Sky’s reputation?

Gabrielle Laine Peters has put together an excellent Storify of tweets and opinion around the Sky directive. Here is her collated selection called Sky News new social media guidelines get Twitter buzzing.

Elana Zak has also used Storify to collage reactions.Similar Posts:

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using LinkedIn as a journalist

Rachel McAthy — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:00:47 +0000

TheNextWeb has a post outlining some of the best ways journalists can make use of LinkedIn, such as by simply searching for contacts or looking at the financial results of companies of interest.

Journalism.co.uk has also recently compiled a list of ten tips for journalists on using the platform, and a podcast on making the most of the site which includes an interview with Krista Canfield, senior manager of corporate communications (consumer PR) at LinkedIn.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using digital tools to report elections

Rachel McAthy — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:21:59 +0000

Mashable has a very useful post which looks at how news outlets are using online tools to cover elections in the US, which offers some great ideas for journalists to take note of.

These range from hosting debates on social media platforms to produce interactive maps and “delegate trackers”.

Last year we also collected together five tools journalists might like to try when reporting election results, from visualisation tools to social publishing platforms.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

#jpod: Who owns your followers? Three journalists discuss Twitter strategy

Rachel McAthy — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:37:55 +0000

Many questions have been raised about what should happen when journalists with a strong online profile, in particular on platforms such as Twitter, leave a company, and whether their followers should … well follow.

In June last year this occurred when the BBC’s former chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg left for ITV, and there was much discussion online about whether or not she would take the thousands of followers of her BBC-branded account with her. Behind the scenes she says there was an “amicable” discussion with the broadcaster, resulting in her being able to transfer the account.

More recently in the US the issue has been returned to the spotlight after a mobile news site reportedly sued a former employee, after he left the company and altered his Twitter name.

While the news industry waits to see what the future of this case will hold, we speak to three journalists using slightly different approaches to their Twitter accounts to find out what is working for them and the importance of legal precedent in this area.

The journalists we hear from are:

Laura Kuenssberg, business editor for ITV, who has a branded account: @ITVLauraK
Joanna Geary, digital development editor at the Guardian, who has a separate personal account and branded, professional account: @joannageary and @GuardianJoanna
Anthony De Rosa, social media editor at Reuters, who has a non-branded account: @AntDeRosa

Journalism.co.uk’s next news:rewired event will feature a panel debate on social media standards.

You can hear all our podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.Similar Posts:

Tool of the week for journalists – Rippla, for tracking the social ‘ripples’ of news stories

Sarah Marshall — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:55:30 +0000

Tool of the week: Rippla

What is it? A tool that allows you to monitor the social media “ripples” of a news story

How is it of use to journalists? Rippla was launched last month as a tool that tracks how news and information reaches into people’s conversations on social media.

It may be interesting to find out that the story with the most “ripples” is currently the Mail Online’s Hilarious video shows cat stroking crying baby and sending him to sleep, followed by George Monbiot’s Guardian comment This bastardised libertarianism makes ‘freedom’ an instrument of oppression, But what is particularly helpful for journalists is the ripples tracker.

Ripples tracker allows you to enter the URL or a news story and see how many times it has been shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks and find out how many bit.ly click-throughs the post has received.

Rippla also offers news sites a widget than can be added (as embedded below), which displays the most socially shared news stories.

Most popular news stories

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – media law tweeters

Rachel McAthy — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:19:04 +0000

The Inforrm (International Forum for Responsible Media) Blog has produced a great list of “useful media law tweeters” who can be followed to keep up with events in the legal world concerning journalism.

As well as a list of 90 tweeters the blog post also offers some useful hashtags to follow relating to current media law events, such as #Leveson and #libelreform.

See the Inforrm post here.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Similar Posts:

Tool of the week for journalists – Playground, to monitor social media analytics

Marianne Bouchart — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:20:27 +0000

Tool of the week: Playground, by PeopleBrowsr.

What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts.

How is it of use to journalists? “Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground,” PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains.

Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities.

These features – and many more – let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject.

Playground lets you use the data the way you want to use it. You can either export the graphs and tables that the site produces automatically or export the results in a CSV file to create your own visualisations, which could potentially make it the next favourite tool of data journalists.

Grill added:

The recent launch of our fully transparent Kred influencer platform will make it faster and easier for journalists to find key influencers in a particular community.

You can give Playground a try for the first 14 days before signing up for one of their subscriptions ($19 a month for students and journalists, $149 for organisations and companies).

Jodee Rich, the founder of PeopleBrowsr, gave an inspiring speech at the Strata Summit in September on how a TV ratings system such as Nielsen could soon be replaced by social media data thanks to the advanced online analytics that PeopleBrowsr offers.

Playground’s development is based on feedback from its community of users, which has been very responsive. Ideas can be sent to contact[@]peoplebrowsr.com or by tweeting @peoplebrowsr.Similar Posts:

Rippla, a site to monitor the social media ‘ripples’ of news stories, launches

Sarah Marshall — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 11:57:22 +0000

Rippla has today launched as a site to track how news stories are shared via social media.

Take a look at the home screen and you will see stories generating the most shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and bit.ly.

The site has been created by journalist and political blogger Sunny Hundal who told Journalism.co.uk Rippla “scrapes news feeds from the UK’s 10 biggest news sites and then ranks them by popularity across social networks. It measures how many ‘ripples’ they’ve created.

The second great feature of this site is the widget, which allows you to enter the URL of a news story from your site and see the social media “ripples” it has created.

Hundal said he created the site for two reasons:

First, I want to track how well media organisations do on social media. The site updates and collects the data every hour.

Second, the longer term aim is to provide people an opportunity to consume content based on what their peers are sharing / reading, rather than simply based on what the newspaper front-page offers. As you know, patterns of media consumption are changing and we think this is the way its all heading.

The site will be in beta for some time while bugs are fixed and functionality is added.Similar Posts:

CNN launches new iReport site

Rachel McAthy — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:06:27 +0000

CNN this week unveiled its new iReport site which, according to a blog post about the changes, will offer greater personalisation, an enhanced community through “groups” and a “favourite button”.

iReport is CNN’s platform for user-generated content, where non-journalists submit video stories, the best of which are broadcast on the news channel.

The update comes five years after iReport was launched and, according to CNN’s post, now has a community of “nearly a million people”.

Last month at news:rewired – connected journalism, CNN digital producer Dominique van Heerden shared some interesting statistics on iReport, such as that CNN had published 912,000 iReports since its launch, with 15,000 iReports published on average every month and 2.4 million unique users in June 2011.

In an article on the new version iReport, lostremote’s Natan Edelsburg said the aim was “to create the largest ‘social network for news,’ according to Lila King, participation director at CNN”.

Read lostremote’s report here.Similar Posts:

Storify: Top tips in a tweet for aspiring journalists

Becky Barnes — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:58:25 +0000

An experienced and well-respected journalist told me a journalist never stops learning, so this piece is for everyone; from aspiring students to old-hand hacks:

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – improving political reporting with social media

Rachel McAthy — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:53:26 +0000

On Poynter Mallary Jean Tenore brings together 25 top tips on using three specific social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and Storify – to improve the way journalists cover elections. Tips include using Facebook’s new timeline feature to look at a politician’s activities, viewing real-time reaction from voters on Twitter and using Storify to filter the stream of information.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

News organisations can now create a Google+ page

Sarah Marshall — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:27:45 +0000

News outlets and brands can now create a Google+ page, something many organisations have been attempting to do since the launch of the social network in June.

Google previously pulled accounts set up by companies and appealed for patience. Yesterday Google announced pages in a blog post and said the roll-out was imminent. That has now happened and pages are open to all.

Journalism.co.uk now has a page on Google+, which you can connect with here.

To create a page for your news organisation select ‘company, institution or organisation’ and the ‘media, news and publishing’ category.

After an initial rush to join Google+ interest then waned. Journalists received an extra incentive to join last week when Google announced that journalists with a Google+ account can get a photo byline on Google News.Similar Posts:

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: Twitter lessons to learn from sport journalists

Rachel McAthy — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:22:51 +0000

The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism has produced a list of five techniques which author Rebekah Monson says she has seen being used successfully by sports journalists in particular on Twitter , and which may prove useful for journalists working in other fields. Examples include the way they offer analysis, provide live coverage and “embrace debate”.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

Twitter, journalists and court coverage: where to draw the line?

Rachel McAthy — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:46:05 +0000

There was an interesting discussion going on at Cardiff University today, as Darren Waters, a social media producer in the BBC Wales newsroom, joined students for a discussion on community which, according to the hashtag on Twitter (#cjscomm), included a topical discussion on the issue of immediacy in online reporting.

Recent events, specifically in relation to court coverage, have demonstrated the issues this can raise for journalists and news outlets working in the online environment, with the pressure and power of immediate publication at their fingertips. Earlier this month several news outlets mistakenly reported that Amanda Knox’s conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher had been upheld, when the judge was in fact returning a guilty verdict for a charge of slander. The murder conviction was overturned, but once the word “guilty” had been heard several news organisations quickly sent out their stories and the Guardian made the same mistake on its liveblog.

Another specific challenge related to this is the delivery and sharing of breaking news on platforms such as Twitter, where journalists face making important decisions of when to share certain information and when to hold back.

In December last year England and Wales’ most senior judge published new guidelines which gave journalists greater freedom to file live reports and Twitter updates from court. As I write this a number of journalists are covering the Vincent Tabak trial live, with the issue of what a journalist should and shouldn’t report from a court case (and the wider approach to using Twitter) being simultaneously highlighted in the Cardiff University discussion.

@egrommet
Glyn MottersheadShould we be tweeting observations in court tweeting, @darrenwaters not sure, I’d go for no. You? #cjscomm
Oct 20 via Twitter for iPhoneFavorite RetweetReply

@trouse11
Tom RouseTwitter allows journalists to be first with the story, is it worth the risk? Described by @darrenwaters as a ‘terrible temptation’ #cjscomm
Oct 20 via SeesmicFavorite RetweetReply

@elenacresci
Elena Cresci@darrenwaters suggesting journos should have a ‘Are you sure you want to publish this?’ double tap button for twitter #cjscomm
Oct 20 via Twitter for BlackBerry®FavoriteRetweetReply

@EMD1990
Emily DaviesPeople tweeting ‘meaningless rubbish’ just to join the conversation devalues journalism #cjscomm #irony
Oct 20 via Twitter for BlackBerry®FavoriteRetweetReply

@joeloboUK
Joe LoboYour twitter audience appreciate a consistent approach from you as a tweeter so they are aware of what they gain from following you #cjscomm
Oct 20 via Twitter for iPhoneFavorite RetweetReply

Follow the hashtag to read more from the debate and advice offered by Waters. And feel free to tell us what you think. Where should the line be drawn in court reporting, especially during the hearing of detailed evidence, and what considerations should journalists make before pressing the button to submit? Share your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter @journalismnews.Similar Posts:

Guardian predicts 1m installs of Facebook app in first month

Sarah Marshall — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:26:42 +0000

The Guardian expects this weekend will see the millionth person install its new Facebook app, exactly a month since it was launched.

The app, which allows Facebook users to see what their friends are reading after a single sign-in when they agree to share their viewing habits, was launched on 22 September at the London leg of Facebook’s F8 conference.

Content sales and marketing director at the Guardian Chris Lawson gave the prediction at the newspaper’s Media Guardian Changing Advertising Summit 2011, which is underway in London.

Less than two weeks after launch, on 5 October, the Guardian reported 129,000 app installs generating over 600,000 story reads.

That figure is likely to grow significantly when the Guardian release up-to-date statistics, which it plans to do in the next few days.Similar Posts: