Category Archives: regulation

Magazine editing: social media policies

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In the first of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about some basic considerations in drawing up social media policies. If you are aware of any particularly good or bad examples of social media policies in the magazine industry, I’d love to know.

Social media policies

A policy need not be particularly restrictive – the key is that everyone is clear what is acceptable (and in some cases, what is encouraged, or ‘best practice’), as well as what to do in particular situations (such as when they receive abusive or offensive messages).

There are plenty of examples to look at online, including a database of social media policies at socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php – key issues for you as a publication are making all journalists aware of legal risks such as defamation, contempt and copyright (which they might normally otherwise think sub-editors are covering) and professionalism (for example, posting inappropriate images on an account they used for professional purposes).

Also worth considering carefully are the areas of objectivity and impartiality. US publications are a lot more anxious about their journalists being perceived to be anything but completely neutral in all affairs, leading to some policies that would appear draconian to the more opinionated Brits.

Neutrality, however, is different to objectivity (which is rather more complicated but comes down to a process based on facts rather than simply creating an appearance of balance through presenting conflicting beliefs), and well informed opinion is a key feature in most magazines.

You want to allow your writers to play to their strengths and find their natural ‘voice’ on social media platforms (institutional voices do not work well here), while also guarding against ill-considered comments that might be used against the publication.

What other issues should a social media policy cover? And why should a magazine have one?

How to deal with a PR man who emails like a lawyer

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There’s a fascinating case study going on across some skeptics blogs on dealing with legal threats from another country.

The Quackometer and Rhys Morgan have – among others – received emails from Marc Stephens, who claims to “represent” the Burzynski Clinic in Houston, Texas, and threatens them with legal action for libel, among other things.

What is notable is how both have researched both Stephens and the law, and composed their responses accordingly. From Rhys Morgan:

“I have carried out some internet research, and I have not been able to establish whether or not Mr. Stephens is a lawyer; certainly he does not appear to be a member of the California Bar nor the Texas Bar in the light of my visit to the California Bar Association’s and the State Bar of Texas’s websites.”

From Quackometer:

“This foam-flecked angry rant did not look like the work of a lawyer to me. And indeed it is not. Marc Stephens appears to work for Burzynski in the form of PR, marketing and sponsorship.”

There’s plenty more in each post, including reference to case law and the pre-action defamation protocol, which provide plenty of material if you’re ever in a similar situation – or hosting a classroom discussion on libel law.

via Neurobonkers

The best piece of Bad Journalism debunking I’ve ever seen

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I’ve just stumbled across Neurobonkers’s blog post The worst piece of drugs reporting I have ever read and wanted to share it here.

The post uses an animated Prezi presentation to take the reader through 10 errors in an article in the Hull Daily Mail on the dangers of a “cheap new drug” (notably, the article is no longer online). I won’t add spoilers by revealing what those errors are – but this is a particularly engaging way to teach journalism students not only about accuracy in reporting on stories such as these, but why it’s important.

Enjoy the presentation.

.prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }

Hull parents warned of cheap new drug as tiny pills sold for as little as 50p on Prezi

20 recent hyperlocal developments (June-August 2011)

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Ofcom’s Damian Radcliffe produces a regular round-up of developments in hyperlocal publishing. In this guest post he cross-publishes his latest presentation for this summer, as well as the background to the reports.

Ofcom’s 2009 report on Local and Regional Media in the UK identified the increasing role that online hyperlocal media is playing in the local and regional media ecology.

New research in the report identified that

“One in five consumers claimed to use community websites at least monthly, and a third of these said they had increased their use of such websites over the past two years.”

That was two years ago, and since then, this nascent sector has continued to evolve, with the web continuing to offer a space and platform for community expression, engagement and empowerment.

The diversity of these offerings is manifest in the Hyperlocal Voices series found on this website, as well as Talk About Local’s Ten Questions feature, both of which speak to hyperlocal practitioners about their work.

For a wider view of developments in this sector, you may want to look at the bi-monthly series of slides I publish on SlideShare every two months.

Each set of slides typically outlines 20 recent hyperlocal developments; usually 10 from the UK and 10 from the US.

Topics in the current edition include Local TV, hyperlocal coverage of the recent England riots, the rise of location based deals and marketing, as well as the FCC’s report on The Information Needs of Communities.

Feedback and suggestions for future editions – including omissions from current slides – are actively welcomed.

When will we stop saying “Pictures from Twitter” and “Video from YouTube”?

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Image from YouTube

Image from YouTube

Over the weekend the BBC had to deal with the embarrassing ignorance of someone in their complaints department who appeared to believe that images shared on Twitter were “public domain” and “therefore … not subject to the same copyright laws” as material outside social networks.

A blog post, from online communities adviser Andy Mabbett, gathered thousands of pageviews in a matter of hours before the BBC’s Social Media Editor Chris Hamilton quickly responded:

“We make every effort to contact people, as copyright holders, who’ve taken photos we want to use in our coverage.

“In exceptional situations, ie a major news story, where there is a strong public interest in making a photo available to a wide audience, we may seek clearance after we’ve first used it.”

(Chris also published a blog post yesterday expanding on some of the issues, the comments on which are also worth reading)

The copyright issue – and the existence of a member of BBC staff who hadn’t read the Corporation’s own guidelines on the matter – was a distraction. What really rumbled through the 170+ comments – and indeed Andy’s original complaint – was the issue of attribution.

Continue reading →

Q: Who owns a journalist’s Twitter account? A: The users

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Screengrab of Laura Kuenssberg's Twitter settings renamed to ITV

image from Tom Callow's Wall blog

When Laura Kuenssberg announced she was leaving the BBC for ITV, much was made of what might happen to her Twitter account. Was @BBCLauraK owned by her employer? (After all, it was branded as such, promoted on TV, and tweets were ‘processed’ by BBC producers). Or should Laura be able to take it with her? (After all, it was Laura that people were following, rather than a generic BBC political news feed).

The implications for the ‘journalist as brand‘ meme were well explored too, while newly empowered journalists may have been concerned to read that companies are inserting social media clauses into contracts:

“To keep hold of the good will created by a brand personality. Recruiters, for example, are often required to hand over their LinkedIn accounts upon leaving, so their contacts remain with the employer.”

Amidst all the speculation, Tom Callow stood out in offering some hard facts:

“When she had earlier tweeted the details of a new separate ITV account to her then 59,000 followers, only around 1,000 of them started following the new account.”

This sounds compelling until you remember that tweets are only seen for a relatively brief period of time by those followers who happen to be watching at that moment, and that a significant proportion of followers of celebrity/high profile accounts are likely to be idle or spam.

Still, it also highlights the fundamental weakness in all the debates about who ‘owns’ a Twitter account. One very important party is not being represented: the users.

Much of the commentary on Laura Kuenssberg’s move treated her 60,000 followers as an “audience”. But of course, they are not: they are users.

Some will be personal acquaintances; some will be fans of the BBC’s political coverage; and yes, some will be spam accounts or accounts set up by curious BBC viewers who forgot their password the next day. Some will follow her to ITV, some will follow her replacement at the BBC, and some never worked out how to click ‘unfollow’. (Kuenssberg’s successor – @BBCNormanS – had 5,824 followers after she tweeted a link, according to Paul Gregory, which means that only around 10% of her followers read either of those tweets and acted on them.)

Whether an employer claims ownership of a social media account or not, they cannot ‘own’ the relationship between users and that account. And there will be as many relationships as users. Some passive; some collaborative; some neglected; some exploitative.

It is those relationships that we should be concerned with developing, not the small print of an employee’s contract.

When information is power, these are the questions we should be asking

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Various commentators over the past year have made the observation that “Data is the new oil“. If that’s the case, journalists should be following the money. But they’re not.

Instead it’s falling to the likes of Tony Hirst (an Open University academic), Dan Herbert (an Oxford Brookes academic) and Chris Taggart (a developer who used to be a magazine publisher) to fill the scrutiny gap. Recently all three have shone a light into the move towards transparency and open data which anyone with an interest in information would be advised to read.

Hirst wrote a particularly detailed post breaking down the results of a consultation about higher education data.

Herbert wrote about the publication of the first Whole of Government Accounts for the UK.

And Taggart made one of the best presentations I’ve seen on the relationship between information and democracy.

What all three highlight is how control of information still represents the exercise of power, and how shifts in that control as a result of the transparency/open data/linked data agenda are open to abuse, gaming, or spin. Continue reading →

The death of the News Of The World

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What an incredible few days. The PCC’s statement yesterday was extraordinary – even if it turns out to be merely a cosmetic exercise. Today’s announcement that the News of the World will end as a brand is, as its mooted replacement would say, a “stunner”.

It took almost exactly 3 days – 72 hours – to kill off a 168-year-old brand. Yes, there were other allegations and two years in the lead up to The Guardian’s revelation that Milly Dowler was targeted by the newspaper. But Milly Dowler and the various other ordinary people who happened to be caught up in newsworthy events (kidnappings, victims of terrorist attacks, families of dead soldiers), were what turned the whole affair.

That story was published at 16.29 on Monday. Incredible.

We talk a lot about the disintermediation of the press – the fact that companies, governments and celebrities can communicate directly with the public. The targeting of the News Of The World’s advertisers, and the rapid mobilisation of thousands of signatures supporting an inquiry, demonstrated that that disintermediation works the other way too. Where once the media could have acted as a dampener on how public protest appeared to advertisers and Parliament, their powers to do so now are more limited. [UPDATE: Paul Mason puts this particularly well here]

So while The Sun may be moving to 7-day production, that doesn’t make this a rebranding or a relaunch. As of Monday, The News of the World brand is dead, 168 years of journalistic history (not to mention 200 jobs) offered up as a sacrifice.

Whether that sacrifice is accepted, and to what extent, is yet to be seen. In the meantime, the significance of this shouldn’t be underestimated.

This post originally appeared on the blog Facebook page

Secure technically doesn’t mean secure legally

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The EFF have an interesting investigation into WSJ and Al-Jazeera ‘leaks’ sites and terms and conditions which suggest users’ anonymity is anything but protected:

“Despite promising anonymity, security and confidentiality, AJTU can “share personally identifiable information in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary.” SafeHouse’s terms of service reserve the right “to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities” without notice, then goes even further, reserving the right to disclose information to any “requesting third party,” not only to comply with the law but also to “protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies” or to “safeguard the interests of others.” As one commentator put it bluntly, this is “insanely broad.” Neither SafeHouse or AJTU bother telling users how they determine when they’ll disclose information, or who’s in charge of the decision.”

FAQ: Self-regulation of online media

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Another series of questions I’ve been asked – with my answers, published here because I don’t want to repeat myself…

1. You have written that people read blogs and other user generated content because they trust the person not the brand; they link or contribute to that content because ‘a journalist invested social capital’ and trust is related to their reputation, knowledge and connections. In a sense I guess reputation, knowledge and connections is what also underpins trust in curated content (e.g. Storyful). My question is whether this informal reliance on the dynamics of social capital is enough to differentiate what Storyful refers to as the ‘news from the noise’ both for ‘curated’ news and online journalism more widely. Or would, for example, a self-regulatory Code be helpful in making this differentiation transparent?

I think a more sophisticated way of looking at this is that people draw on a range of ‘signals’ to make a judgement about the trustworthiness of content: that includes their personal history of interactions with the author; the author’s formal credentials, including qualifications and employer; the author’s network; the author’s behaviour with others; numerous other factors including for example ratings by strangers, friends and robots; and of course the content itself – is the evidence transparent, the argument /narrative logical, etc.

A self-regulatory Code would add another signal – but one that could be interpreted either way: some will see it as a badge of credibility; others as a badge of ‘sell-out’ or pretence to authority. The history of previous attempts suggest it would not particularly succeed.

I’m by no means an expert on trust – would be interesting to explore more literature on that.

2. The PCC has welcomed online journalists to join it – is there interest among the online journalism community? I appreciate the level of antipathy expressed in the blogging community when this was raised late 2009, but I wonder whether the current consultation in relation to live electronic communications for court reporting by accredited journalists could raise the significance of notions of accreditation (through the PCC or independent to it) for online journalists.

Many people blog precisely because they feel that the press does not self-regulate effectively: in a sense they are competing with the PCC (one academic described bloggers as ‘Estate 4.5’). It has a bad reputation – to stand any change of attracting bloggers it would have to give them a genuine voice and incorporate many of the ethical concerns that they have about journalism. I don’t see that happening.

Accreditation is a key issue, however – or at least respectability to advertisers; some bloggers are moving away from calling themselves ‘blogs’ as they look for more ad revenue. But they are a minority: most do not rely on ad revenue. As access to courts and council meetings is explicitly widened, accreditation is less of a problem.

3. If on-line journalists were to consider self regulation what would be the key principles that might inform it: accuracy, fairness, privacy? What of harm and in particular protection of the under 18’s? Or are such notions irrelevant in the world of social capital?

This post – http://paulbradshaw.wpengine.com/2011/03/07/culture-clash-journalisms-ideology-vs-blog-culture/ – is a good summary of how I think the two compare. Most bloggers see themselves as fiercely ethical and you will frequently see them rise up to defend the vulnerable – sometimes unaware of their intimidatory power in attacking those they see as responsible. You will also see them correcting inaccurate reporting.

If anything these notions are more important in a world of social capital: my accuracy, fairness and treatment of the vulnerable dictates part of my social capital. If I make a mistake, my social capital can be damaged for a long time to come – we don’t yet have any concept of our social crimes ‘expiring’ online.