“Anti-social” Journalists on Social Media?

A lot of discussion recently about how journalists should engage with social media – esp. on the back of 11 guidelines issues by the Wall Street Journal for its staffers, including:

• Don’t discuss articles that haven’t been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted.
• Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.

While the Journal’s guidelines stress ethics and make a lot of sense, the interactive nature of social media makes delivering on the above two pretty hard. Further, journalists who are totally transparent in terms of their movements or how they’re piecing stories together look more ‘social’ and could gain access to greater input or insight from their networks. Be interesting to see how enforceable social media guidelines for journalists actually are – keen to also know whether any publishers in Asia have come up with similar guidelines?

We all know the media industry is going through a tough time globally, so using every opportunity to get an edge on fast and accurate information is key. Trick is, fast and accurate can be competitive, beautifully summed up by awesome Indexed Blog cartoon – Good Luck, Journalism.