Keep your thoughts to yourself
In an attempt to grapple with this blurring of the personal and the professional, New York Times assistant managing editor Craig Whitney sent a memo to staffers outlining how the company's ethics policy plays out in social media. The memo immediately went viral.
The memo asked journalists to, in effect, strip out from their online personae anything that might help others get to know them as people. Instead, they were instructed to always think of themselves as the voice of the paper -- and to stick to their own patch. For example, news journalists are not supposed to editorialize, even on a personal web page, because they don't write for the Opinion section of the newspaper.
In general, Whitney's memo is a thoughtful and reasonable document, pondering nuances such as the fact that a Facebook friend may not be an actual friend -- so it might be OK to write about one. In general, it's a reminder of how the Times' very old-school journalistic rules play out in the new media world. There's nothing new here, in that respect. Some newspaper editors feel that they shouldn't even vote in order to maintain their journalistic neutrality.
What's new is the immediate viral redistribution of what was intended as an internal document. The memo was reprinted in full online by The Poynter Institute, a professional development organization for journalists.
The newspaper was criticized by the blogosphere for being, um, behind the times. "No wonder even The New York Times is suffering," the chorus went. "They just don't get new media." And we can imagine its stately editors wringing their hands over the public airing of their internal laundry. Nevertheless, you could argue that this very traditional approach is one of the Times' brand attributes, and this was all some terrific social media burnishing of its image.
