Former BBC News chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg began her new role as ITV business editor today. Kuenssberg built up quite a Twitter following during her time at the BBC, around 67,000 people, due in no small part to her coverage of last year’s general election saga.
In the wake of the announcement of her move to ITV there was, in her own words, “frenzied conversation” about what would happen to her Twitter account. It was, after all, a professional account, it had BBC in the name. So who did the followers belong to?
In the end, the agreement with the BBC was “entirely amicable”, according to Kuenssberg, and she transferred her account and followers to @ITVLauraK.
Today she writes on her new ITV blog about her take on the issue of professional Twitter accounts and ownership:
Given my belief that those who tweet have minds of their own, the clamour over what would happen to @BBCLauraK, the corporation’s first official journalist Twitter stream, took me rather by surprise. But, more importantly, what the fuss did demonstrate was how central online reporting has become to the work of journalists. No doubt, having started tweeting as an experiment two years ago during the party conference season, it became almost as important to me to break stories on Twitter as it did to get them on air on the BBC’s rolling news channel.