Ever since the first all-staff e-mail was forwarded outside of the bunker walls, media companies have scrambled to keep some semblance of control over their employees’ e-lives.
Twitter, despite its 140 character limit, has made those walls thinner than ever.
Now news organizations across all media are looking to amend -- or at the very least clarify -- the rules that govern their staffers’ use of social networking tools.
The most public leak was former ABC News White House Correspondent Terry Moran's tweeting of an off-the-record comment in which President Obama, in a pre-interview chat with CNBC, called Kanye West a "jackass" for his behavior at the MTV Music Video Awards.
Within the hour, ABC News had the Tweet – and others – deleted. The network then apologized to the White House and CNBC.
But the problem has not been limited to Moran.
Raju Narisetti, managing editor at the Washington Post, shut down his Twitter account late last week after some of his tweeted opinions -- on health-care reform and term limits -- drew the ire of the paper’s executives as breaching required objectivity.
Though relatively “innocuous” fare as far as Twitter goes, according to the paper’s ombudsman Andrew Alexander, executive editor Marcus Brauchli fired off a memo to employees detailing the paper’s new guidelines governing Twitter use.
"Nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment,” the rules read. “Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything -- including photographs or video -- that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.”
The backlash from Twitterville has been, as one might expect, harsh. "Just another example of a newspaper as a clueless ostrich," one wrote.
"The Wash Post actually expects reporters to *have no opinions*? I.e., to be high-functioning idiot savants," Time magazine columnist James Poniewozik wrote on his Twitter feed. (Poniewozik followed up with a blog post entitled "The Washington Post Slaps the Twitter Handcuffs on its Staff.")
But in terms of reporting, Twitter -- despite being a great tool -- can circumvent the editorial process, executives say.
“There’s a thick, dark line between material that is in the process of being reported, and material that has been vetted and published,” Jeffrey Schneider, VP of public relations at ABC News, told TheWrap.
Schneider said that while there is not, to his knowledge, an actual document outlining guidelines for use of e-media at ABC, staffers understand what they are.
“Since the advent of e-mail we’ve had them,” he said, adding: “The technology has changed, but the principles are the same. “Our guidelines remain the same -- it’s just getting our people to abide by them.”
But the problem has even arisen at the New York Times, where several staffers were reprimanded for Tweeting about an internal strategy meeting about the future of its website.
One of them, Brian Stelter, updated
