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Journalistic use of Twitter
BBC News and Sky have both announced restrictions on their employees’ use of twitter. BBC want their employees’ to let the news desk know before Twitter, whereas Sky have restricted their journalists from retweeting stories and to tread the official line. This all seems a tad unreasonable to me. In curtailing their use of Twitter, the BBC and Sky are going to turn their journalists into bores as well as rejecting one of the fastest growing media formats.
Let’s take the example of the recent death of Whitney Houston; how many people actually found out about it from reading a newspaper or watching the news? I certainly didn’t and it isn’t the reason I read newspapers or watch the news. It’s for analysis, something which can’t be included in a 140 word tweet or a Facebook status. Breaking news is a thing of the past; social media spreads it so much faster than the news room was ever able to. BBC and Sky should realise this. Of course, many people may say that social networking sites will never be 100% accurate, there was recently a RIP Madonna trend on Twitter, but that’s nothing a quick search on Google won’t sort out. The Google search might even lead you to Sky News or the BBC, where you’ll get both confirmation and more information. There is a slight sense of paranoia and craziness that they’re getting scared over something which, in all likelihood, will lead most people to their websites anyway.
Then, of course, there are certain worries over freedom. The restrictions could almost be seen as limiting what the journalist can say, they now have to go through a newsroom and, at least in the case of Sky, have their opinions checked. This seems to me to be limiting a journalist, in what they can think and their opinions on a certain topic. Surely the beauty of social media is that it is truly individual, free of left- or right-wing rhetoric? By controlling, or at least checking, what their journalists post on Twitter, they remove the individual from the story; they force that person to have one opinion and one opinion only. The stories will become bland and uninteresting, without a real point of view or angle.
Stories will become even more bland and uninteresting when you consider that Twitter and other social media are also hubs of debate, where a journalist can easily find “real” people’s views. In not tweeting they perhaps limit the scope of a story by not finding out about people’s reactions to a certain event and therefore lose the chance of having an original take on the story. Once again, I see the threat of the news becoming just a mundane list of things from an angle that the journalist has been forced to take, distanced from what the people who are watching or reading actually think.
Of course, this could just be me overreacting. Perhaps the intentions of the BBC and Sky are just to make sure that their news rooms stay up to date. Yet it does seem to me that in doing so they are damaging the journalists’ ability to communicate the news, they are damaging the journalists’ ability to form their own opinion and they are damaging the journalists’ ability to communicate with the public. In becoming obsessed with breaking the news the fastest, Sky and BBC seem to have forgotten what true journalism is about: analysis. That is something that simply cannot be contained in a tweet.