Re:Social Media Guidelines for the Times Newsroom
by dmckeon on Friday October 13, 2017 @03:32PM
(#15468643)
The phrase:
> our journalists
is used 14 times. Do the serfs go with the land, or
can they have any private/personal online presence?
I get that the Times is using "our journalists" as a shorthand for
"journalists employed by the Times" or "people who work at the
Times' newsrooms" but this seems like an exclusion of many
significant personal opinions from online spaces.
It also seems to be a shift from journalists having both a private
persona and a separate public body of work to a single public
persona who is always and constantly expected to be on the public
stage - like an on-call physician, a well-known trial lawyer, a
politician, a celebrity, or an actor.
We might expect that shift for a small percentage of the people in
journalism - the ones whose names might be recognized by any
reader or viewer - but do we want it for all journalists?
> our journalists
is used 14 times. Do the serfs go with the land, or can they have any private/personal online presence?
I get that the Times is using "our journalists" as a shorthand for "journalists employed by the Times" or "people who work at the Times' newsrooms" but this seems like an exclusion of many significant personal opinions from online spaces.
It also seems to be a shift from journalists having both a private persona and a separate public body of work to a single public persona who is always and constantly expected to be on the public stage - like an on-call physician, a well-known trial lawyer, a politician, a celebrity, or an actor.
We might expect that shift for a small percentage of the people in journalism - the ones whose names might be recognized by any reader or viewer - but do we want it for all journalists?