At first glance, Sky’s decision that its journalists should not retweet information that has “not been through the Sky News editorial process” and the BBC’s policy to prioritise filing “written copy into our newsroom as quickly as possible” seem logical.

For Sky it is about maintaining editorial control over all content produced by its staff. For the BBC, it seems to be about making sure that the newsroom, and by extension the wider organisation, takes priority over the individual.

But there are also blind spots in these strategies that they may come to regret.

Our content?

The Sky policy articulates an assumption about ‘content’ that’s worth picking apart.

We accept as journalists that what we produce is our responsibility. When it comes to retweeting, however, it’s not entirely clear what we are doing. Is that news production, in the same way that quoting a source is? Is it newsgathering, in the same way that you might repeat a lead to someone to find out their reaction? Or is it merely distribution?

The answer, as I’ve written before, is that retweeting can be, and often is, all three.

Writing about a similar policy at the Oregonian late last year, Steve Buttry made the point that retweets are not endorsements. Jeff Jarvis argued that they were “quotes”.

I don’t think it’s as simple as that (as I explain below), but I do think it’s illustrative: if Sky News were to prevent journalists from using any quote on air or online where they could not verify its factual basis, then nothing would get broadcast. Live interviews would be impossible.

The Sky policy, then, seems to treat retweets as pure distribution, and – crucially – to treat the tweet in isolation. Not as a quote, but as a story, consisting entirely of someone else’s content, which has not been through Sky editorial processes but which is branded or endorsed as Sky journalism.

Curation vs creation

There’s a second issue here which is more about hard commercial success. Research suggests that successful users of Twitter tend to combine curation with creation. Preventing journalists from retweeting  leaves them – and their employers – without a vital tool in their storytelling and distribution.

The tension surrounding retweeting can be illustrated in the difference between two broadcast journalists who use Twitter particularly effectively: Sky’s own Neal Mann, and NPR’s Andy Carvin. Andy retweets habitually as a way of seeking further information. Neal, as he explained in this Q&A with one of my classes, feels that he has a responsibility not to retweet information he cannot verify (from 2 mins in).

Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. But both combine curation with creation.

Network effects

A third issue that strikes me is how these policies fit uncomfortably alongside the networked ways that news is experienced now.

The BBC policy, for example, appears at first glance to prevent journalists from diving right into the story as it develops online. Social media editor Chris Hamilton does note, importantly, that they have “a technology that allows our journalists to transmit text simultaneously to our newsroom systems and to their own Twitter accounts”. However, this is coupled with the position that:

“Our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.”

This is an interesting line of argument, and there are a number of competing priorities underlying it that I want to understand more clearly.

Firstly, it implies a separation of newsroom systems and Twitter. If newsroom staff are not following their own journalists on Twitter as part of their systems, why not? Sky pioneered the use of Twitter as an internal newswire, and the man responsible, Julian March, is now doing something similar at ITV. The connection between internal systems and Twitter is notable.

Then there’s that focus on “all our audiences” in opposition to those early adopter Twitter types. If news is “breaking news, an exclusive or any kind of urgent update”, being first on Twitter can give you strategic advantages that waiting for the six o’clock – or even typing a report that’s over 140 characters – won’t. For example:

• Building a buzz (driving people to watch, listen to or search for the fuller story)
• Establishing authority on Google (which ranks first reports over later ones)
• Establishing the traditional authority in being known as the first to break the story
• Making it easier for people on the scene to get in touch (if someone’s just experienced a newsworthy event or heard about it from someone who was, how likely is it that they search Twitter to see who else was there? You want to be the journalist they find and contact)

Everything at the same time

There’s another side to this, which is evidence of news organisations taking a strategic decision that, in a world of information overload, they should stop trying to be the first (an increasingly hard task), and instead seek to be more authoritative. To be able to say, confidently, “Every atom we distribute is confirmed”, or “We held back to do this spectacularly as a team”.

There’s value in that, and a lot to be admired. I’m not saying that these policies are inherently wrong. I don’t know the full thinking that went into them, or the subtleties of their implementation (as Rory Cellan-Jones illustrates in his example, which contrasts with what can actually happen). I don’t think there is a right and a wrong way to ‘do Twitter’. Every decision is a trade off, because so many factors are in play. I just wanted to explore some of those factors here.

As soon as you digitise information you remove the physical limitations that necessitated the traditional distinctions between the editorial processes of newsgathering, production, editing and distribution.

A single tweet can be doing all at the same time. Social media policies need to recognise this, and journalists need to be trained to understand the subtleties too.

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This week a new nail was driven into the coffin of the notion of journalistic objectivity. The culprit? The Washington Post’s leaked social media policy.

The policy is aimed at preserving the appearance of objectivity rather than its actual existence. It focuses on what journalists are perceived to be, rather than what they actually do.

And in doing so, it hits upon the very reason why their attempt is doomed from the start:

“Our online data trails reflect on our professional reputations and those of The Washington Post. Be sure that your pattern of use does not suggest, for example, that you are interested only in people with one particular view of a topic or issue.”

Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society.

That pretence has been crumbling for years. In 1976 the Glasgow Media Group‘s Bad News study demonstrated how TV news favoured powerful groups by measuring a number of factors in news coverage. Dozens of other studies have followed a similar vein, using the measurability of journalistic output as their barometer. Meanwhile, depending where you sit politically, you’ll find a right-wing or left-wing media conspiracy to believe in.

Objectivity was always a phantom conjured by publishers to appeal to maximum audiences and advertisers [see comments fleshing out objectivity as method vs style]. Regulators then helped by requiring objectivity to broadcast in a limited bandwidth spectrum. The first nail in its coffin came with the end of those limits. As Dan Gillmor explained in The End of Objectivity:

“Objectivity is a construct of recent times. One reason for its rise in the journalism sphere has been the consolidation of newspapers and television into monopolies and oligopolies in the past half-century. If one voice overwhelms all the others, there is a public interest in playing stories as straight as possible — not favoring one side over the other (or others, to be more precise, as there are rarely just two sides to any issue).

“There were good business reasons to be “objective,” too, not least that a newspaper didn’t want to make large parts of its community angry. And, no doubt, libel law has played a role, too. If a publication could say it “got both sides,” perhaps a libel plaintiff would have more trouble winning.”

It was also born from 19th century beliefs in the scientific method and the search for abstract ‘truth’. But society is not a petri dish; and journalists are no scientists: their methodologies are flawed by the need for narrative and the rhythm of the deadline. And most don’t understand scientific methods at all.

So when you can not only measure the lack of balance in journalistic output, but also the lack of balance in journalists’ behaviour and relationships online, the game is well and truly up.

Imagine you’re a trainee journalist who has grown up in a Web 2.0 world: a member of countless Facebook groups; signatory to a dozen online petitions; tagged in Flickr galleries of protests and rallies. Oh, and your profile tells us not only your gender, but your ethnicity, religion, relationship status and sexuality. Will an offer of a job on the Washington Post now come with the request that you cut all ties to your previous life and wipe all records of your former existence as you join the monastic seclusion of Journalistic Objectivity?

Yes, journalists have opinions. And friends. And they rely on easily accessible sources.

Well, hold the front page.

So there lies the problem - but also the solution. Transparency is hastening the demise of the already crumbling notion of journalistic objectivity; but it also represents the best hope for journalistic integrity – and ultimately, for many journalists that was what the pursuit of objectivity was about.

As David Weinberger argues:

“Transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.

“Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness. Why should we trust what one person — with the best of intentions — insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?”

So keep your social media profiles, and make yourself available to a thousand potential sources rather than relying on the dozen in your contacts book. Link to your raw material and let people comment on the holes in your narrative. Engage with online communities if you expect them to engage with you.And stop thinking about the PR of how you look and focus on the journalism of what you do.

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