Sky News bans reporters from retweeting from "professional" accounts

Sky News has issued guidance to its reporters on their Twitter use. Under the new policy, Sky reporters are prohibited from retweeting from rival journalists and the public (though they are allowed to retweet each other). They are also not allowed to tweet about subjects that aren't their beat. Finally, they're prohibited from "personal" tweets in their professional accounts. The leaked memo describes the rubric for this as "ensur[ing] that our journalism is joined up across platforms, there is sufficient editorial control of stories reported by Sky News journalists and that the news desks remain the central hub for information going out on all our stories."

Sky News has cultivated a reputation for digital innovation and has used Twitter to break news on events including the Arab Spring uprising and England riots. Journalists at the broadcaster expressed shock and dismay at the new guidelines, which they claim are a retrograde step.

...[The memo] added that "on a number of occasions" those guidelines have been flouted "resulting in us running different information on Twitter other Sky platforms or the news desks learning from Twitter details that should have been first passed on to them".

Sky News clamps down on Twitter use (via Memex 1.1)

• [skeletoncityrepeater]

  Most of the guidelines seem reasonable, except perhaps the ones about not tweeting something new. A rule against retweeting something seen only on Twitter seems like a good way to maintain ‘journalistic integrity’. Is the intent of this rubric to maintain integrity, or to clamp down on reporters’ freedom? I hope the former is true. Retweeting is not journalism, in my opinion. The guidelines do seem too broad, though, erring toward the conservative.

  • [scatterfingers]

     It’s about making sure that their other properties (which they make money from) aren’t upstaged by the web (which they don’t).

• [Christian Buggedei]

  what skeletoncityrepeater said. Also, this apparently only applies to the “official” twitter accounts – the journalists are apparently free to tweet to their hearts delight from their personal ones.

• [Purplecat]

  These rules would make sense if they were trying to be a reliable and verifiable source of original information, but of course that’s not what Sky News actually is. They’re really more like aggregators, republishing press releases, wire stories and canned interviews to drive up clicks/viewers to make more money from advertising; all while adding as much bias as they can sneak past the UK regulators.

  • [skeletoncityrepeater]

    Maybe someone at the organization is trying to build their reputation in a journalistic direction.  I am not trying to appear contrarian and I don’t disagree with your comment.

• [darkjayson]

  People look to offical accounts from any media source as offical and therefor true.

  So there not allowed to relay news from unconfirmed sources be it other journalists where they don’t have access to the source of the information, the public where they can not confirm the accuracy of the information or for items that they are not qualified to write about, i.e. a sport reportor posting polical news.  Also any personal posts have nothing to do with there work so should not go in there work accouts but in there own personal accounts.

  All that seams resonable I think the story here is that a normal boring memo gets leaked.

• [Tom Hiles]

  This seems sensible. Could Cory explain what we’re meant to take from this post, or should we expect more posts on corporations’ social networking policies?

• [neil mccomb]

  I think the point here is that those who use twitter well usually adopt a collaborative approach. It gives an impression that it’s the news, or at least good journalism that’s important and not the dictates of the parent company.

  The thing I thought most interesting about the email sent to SKY reporters isn’t mentioned in this post though. They aren’t allowed to break any stories on twitter. They have to first contact the News Desk before tweeting. This is presumably to get permission for a story but will surely lead to other organisations getting the scoop.

• [Mordicai]

  Oh…okay?  That doesn’t seem particularly noteworthy.  A policy of conduct is…fine?  Not using official accounts for personal tweets or for retweeting doesn’t seem unreasonable?

• [Dom Fletcher]

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16946279 - Some context