when personal & professional collide: ethics in the social media era

WHEN PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL COLLIDE:

ETHICS IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA ERA

John BethuneB2BMemes.com

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

“You don’t have to be an emotionless robot, but you need to act like one.”

Sports Illustrated Writer Fired for Clapping During Daytona 500,Noah Davis, SportsNewser, March 1, 2011


Traditional journalistic ethics is predicated on firmly

separating the personal and private

from the professional and

public.


privacy is dying, if not dead.

But in the social media era,


“You have zero privacy anyway.

Get over it.”

--Scott McNealy, 1999Flickr.com/webmink

This is not new.


Identity & Reputation

As a result of our “increasing publicness” of social media, identity and reputation are coming closer and sometimes into conflict.

-- Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine,com, March 8, 2011


The personal you and the professional you

are becoming one and the same.


Ethics in Transition



• If you have your own personal social media accounts, what are your responsibilities and risks?




• Do the companies we work for need social media policies?





• Do editors need their own personal policies?






• Is transparency more important than objectivity?






• Is transparency more important than objectivity?

• Is real-time, process journalism inherently more personal?


“I had been wanting to start a blog for some time, but I fretted about . . . all those stories on the news about people who got fired for writing things on their blogs.”

--Steven Roll 2010

Can Social Media Get You Fired?


–verb (internet, slang) Dismissed from one's job as a result of one's

actions on the Internet.

Heather Armstrong, fired in 2002 for comments she made on her personal website, dooce.com

Dooced


Could it happen to you?


CNN Producer Says He Was Fired for Blogging




Post Editor Ends Tweets as New Guidelines Are Issued





CNN Fires Octavia Nasr over tweet praising late ayatollah





CNN Fires Octavia Nasr over tweet praising late ayatollah

AP Reporter Reprimanded For Facebook Post



Is the answer a corporate social media policy?


Is the answer a corporate social media policy?

Or will it just make things worse?


Reuters gets it right . . .“The distinction between the private and the professional has largely broken down online

and you should assume that your professional and personal social media

activity will be treated as one no matter how hard you try to keep them

separate.”


. . . and wrong

“The advent of social media does not change your relationship with the company that

employs you”


The advent of social media doesn’t just change your relationship with your

employer - it transforms that relationship.

The Reality:


Associated Press

Q: Why does the AP care or think it should have a say in what I put on my

social networking feed/page?

A: We all have a stake in upholding the AP’s reputation for fairness and impartiality, which has been one of our chief assets for more than 160

years.


News Media Guild

“Parts of the [AP] policy seem to be snuffing out peoples’ First Amendment rights of expression by a company that wraps itself in the First Amendment.”

--Tony Winton, Guild president


Michael Hyatt, CEO, Thomas Nelson:5 Arguments Against Social Media Policies


1. Your people can be trusted.




2. Social media are just one more way to communicate.





3. More rules only make your company more bureaucratic.






4. Formal policies only discourage people from participating.






4. Formal policies only discourage people from participating.

5. You probably already have policies that govern behavior.



Journal Register CEO John Paton’s Three Simple Rules

for Using Social Media




1.




1.

2.




1.

2.

3.


Do you need a personal social media policy?



• Will you avoid covering the same area as your employer?




• Will you tell your employer about your social media activity?





• Will you discuss your work on your personal accounts?





• Will you discuss your work on your personal accounts?

• Will you engage in your social media while at work?


When privacy is dead, transparency becomes more important than objectivity

Transparency


Sometimes transparency isn’t too personal. . .


And sometimes it gets very personal


“This disclosure and the interactive nature of blogging [make the conflict of interest acceptable]. . . . While some may raise

objections, Dow Jones feels the transparency will give readers a chance to judge my work on its

merits.”

Social Media: A Different Ethical Standard?


Is Transparency Alone Enough?


Two Views of Transparency. . . Pro

Henry Blodgett, Business Insider:

“Our policy is to take these opportunities case-by-case. If we think travel or an event partially paid for by a company will help us produce content that our readers love, we’ll be happy to consider it. If we think it will lead to us producing crap or fluff or be a waste of time, we won’t do it.”


Two Views of Transparency. . . and Con

Felix Salmon, Reuters:

“Failure to disclose freebies like this is very bad; disclosing them, however, isn’t much better. So the best

solution is to simply refuse to take them.”


THE ETHICS OF REAL-TIME JOURNALISM


In traditional journalism, reporters stand apart from their personal selves and are

uninvolved in what they report on.

Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool (1969)


In real-time journalism, the observer often

becomes a participant

Paid Content 2011 conference. Photo and tweet by Rex Hammock (@r)


Is Liveblogging Journalism?

The Guardian’s live blog combined wire service

reports, tweets, YouTube and livestream video, and

other sources.

Not everyone liked it.


Liveblogging Criticism

“There is no structure and therefore no sense, and the effect is of being in the

middle of a room full of loud, shouty and excitable people all yelling at once with

all the phones ringing, the fire alarm going off and a drunken old boy slurring

in your ear about ‘what it all means.’”

--John Symes


Liveblogging Praise

“The liveblog isn't meant to be read when it's finished. It's meant to be read while it's happening. . . . It is a product of

the process-driven mindset . . . It is, as the very name suggests, a live thing.”

--Adam Tinworth


Process Journalism:

Paying Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain


“Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect.

“That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfection . . . [or] that we have no standards.

“It just means that we do journalism differently.”

Jeff Jarvis on Process Journalism


Process-Journalism Standards

• Collaboration

• Transparency

• Letting readers into the process

• Saying what we don’t know


The best solution is to be yourself.

If that makes you uneasy, talk with your shrink.

Better yet, blog about it.

Personal or Professional?

-- Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine.com, March 8. 2011


Thank You!

John [email protected]


mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

when personal & professional collide: ethics in the social media era

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