Twitter And The NY Times

A few recent slips with Twitter catch the attention of Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor of the NY Times:

Nobody edits Times reporters on Twitter, and its prevailing style — fast, chatty, personal — can lull a user into opening up far too much. The Times has written guidelines for social media. As Philip Corbett, the standards editor, put it, they boil down to a warning that Times staffers on Facebook and Twitter “can’t think of it as a personal activity. Like it or not, they are seen as a representative of The New York Times.”

Hiroko Tabuchi, who said she knew the guidelines, nonetheless let frustration get the better of her on March 29, when she attended a news conference by Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota. Her string of tweets about the event was first reported by The Nytpicker, an anonymous Web site that focuses on The Times.

With less than three hours of sleep, Tabuchi wrote, she had to get up at 6 a.m. “We love you Mr. Toyoda!” After the news conference, she wrote that Toyoda took few questions and “ignored reporters, incl me who tried to ask a follow-up. I’m sorry, but Toyota sucks.”

Lawrence Ingrassia, the business editor, said reporters have always complained to one another, about irritations at work, sometimes vividly, but when they do it “to the world, live, I think it’s unacceptable.” I would have pulled Tabuchi from the Toyota story, but Ingrassia said he decided not to because what she wrote indicated she was upset with the company’s press arrangements, not prejudiced against it or its products. He said he saw no bias in her reporting and had received no complaints about it.

Tabuchi said: “The banter on Twitter is often very casual and forces us to economize on words. That can be perilous. But the last thing I’d want is collegial banter and humor to affect perceptions of our coverage.”

Tabuchi said she regards Twitter as an invaluable way to connect with readers and to get sources for stories. Jennifer Preston, the social media editor, said The Times has used it successfully on major breaking news like the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and the shootings at Fort Hood.

We will become more used to people being human and not robots, as they share more of the everyday frustrations of their jobs. Don’t be surprised when there is some leakage of emotion, even in an organization that is predicated on the journalistic credo of dispassionate observation.