Social media at the WashPost: It's time to loosen the tie

For the sake of full disclosure, I spent a little more than two years working as an editor and later a reporter/blogger for the Washington Post - roughly from the summer of 2005 until early fall of 2007.

I tell you this because it gives you some insight into how my thoughts were formed on this Washington Post social policy story that's left the newspaper under fire. For those who missed it, the newspaper launched a pretty rigid policy about its journalists' participation in networks like Facebook and Twitter after a top editor posted tweets that touched on the health care debate, the deficit and the war.

This much is true: The Post takes pride in delivering the news with fairness, accuracy and integrity. That was clear from the first time I interviewed with the Post's editors. In a town where everyone seems to have a political agenda, the folks at The Post seemed to agree that it was critical for the watchdog of the community - and the nation - to be fair (or at least offer the perception of being fair) every day.

That's very noble but the Post, it appears, tends to be overly paranoid and cautious in its attempt to prove that it's not biased.  It didn't surprise me one bit to read the policy and recognize the level of control that the Post wants to maintain over its journalists and what they're saying and doing on social media sites. In my brief time at The Post, I had my instances where I struggled with editors over content in blogs, versus content in a print news story. Once, one of my reporters was pulled from covering a story because he had mentioned in a blog post that he was also a customer of the company that was in the news.

The way I saw it, his disclosure of being a customer was a good thing. It offered the reporter additional insight into the company's practices that readers might appreciate. And so what if he was a customer. This company had a lot of customers. In the eyes of the top editors, though, he was tarnished and could no longer be trusted (by the readers) to report and write the news without his motives being questioned.

Maybe those were the sort of memos that needed to be circulated during the Watergate years. And maybe there are still some beats that need policies tied to them. But, the larger point is that journalism in 2009 is different from journalism in 1973 - the way it's gathered, the way it's sourced, the way it's reported. And The Post, with this latest memo, is showing that it still believes in those old Watergate-era ways of reporting the news.

By putting the Post's journalists behind a virtual wall that all but discourages participation in social media, they're doing a greater harm to the publication itself. The journalists that once could use those platforms - Twitter, Facebook and others - to engage in debates with readers and sources, are now forced to be silent non-participants out of fear that anything they say might be perceived to be a bias.

I know that's how I felt after a scolding I received for blogging something that apparently could have shown a bias. There were instances when I avoided certain topics for a Post blog because, without an understanding of my history with the company/product/service, the post would be less interesting.

Newspapers are in trouble. There's no doubt about it. That's all the more reason that The Post should be encouraging its journalists to become active participants in social media, instead of imposing unrealistic policies that discourages them. Policies aren't terrible - but the process in which they're created needs some work. The Post's editors would have been better off starting a newsroom-wide conversation about social media and crafting some guidelines written in pencil, instead of pen.

A friend passed along this blog post from public relations firm Hill and Knowlton. The agency crafted their guidelines - not policies - by sparking a conversation about how employees used social networking sites in both their personal and professional worlds. Consider this excerpt from the blog post's summary:

Our principles are split into three sections: personal use of social media; professional use of social media on behalf of our company and clients; and use of our official social media platforms. You might say this separation isn’t necessary, but we have found that not all of our staff operate in all these spaces so we want to make sure they can quickly identify the bits that are relevant to them. You might also say that this makes them too long, and the only guideline should actually be “use your common sense”. That is undoubtedly a valid approach but if we are talking about being accountable to ourselves, our clients and the social media community, that simply doesn’t wash.

I know the Post's editors didn't solicit my advice but I'll offer it anyway: Loosen that tie, give the Hill & Knowlton blog post a read and then take a lesson or two. If the Washington Post expects to reinvent itself in this age of blogs, tweets and links, it's going to have to learn that we're headed for 2010, not 1974.

Suggested readiing:

Time.com: The Washington Post Slaps the Twitter Handcuffs on Its Staff

Washingtonpost.com Faster Forward: Why Reporters Should Twitter (A Little Shop Talk)

Washington Post Omblog: Post Editor Ends Tweets as New Guidelines Are Issued