Social media comment - expert or what?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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For every single item of hard news published there may be scores, if not hundreds, of associated comments (to which LiveWire makes no apology for adding by the way) – well informed or otherwise. And with social media comments increasingly outnumbering the “expert” kind, how do information managers respond?

It was Bloomberg’s purchase of the mainstream magazine Businessweek (covered for LiveWire by Penny Crossland in 2009) that marked the newswire veteran’s diversification from news to comment. Now it’s taking the process a step further by starting to publish editorials in the new opinion section of Bloomberg News: Bloomberg View.

As befits a news organisation with a global reputation, Bloomberg has hired a “stellar corps of columnists” which it says will have the capacity to shape national and global discussion. So you have to wonder whether the act of taking off the brakes on comment in one department has actually prompted it now to update its guidelines to its workaday journalists in another.

Internal Bloomberg guidelines, leaked to the media industry publication eMedia Vitals, explain in some detail how its journalists should deal with social media – whether posting to them or making use of them as sources. Some of the advice they offer looks spot on for information managers as well.

Privacy settings or no, assume anything published on the web is publicly available, they say – and deleting it doesn’t ensure its removal either. Assume, too, that internal meetings are off the record unless otherwise stated.

Be sceptical of any information forwarded on a social network, they continue; Bloomberg’s readers depend on their reporting for observation and insight derived from fact – not from opinion or gossip. And retweeting can imply endorsement – so you should apply the same standards of verification as you would to anything else.

As LiveWire has reported in the past, others have been there before Bloomberg. Guidelines from the Financial Times in 2008 warned that “I read it on Wikipedia” would not play well when confronted with a demand for a correction – and Reuters guidelines last year offered similar warnings.

Both Reuters and Bloomberg issue reminders that news should be broken on their proprietary channels first – good advice for any corporate spokesperson who is tempted to tweet before getting an official press release authorised. And it’s reassuring to know that LiveWire observes the Bloomberg principle that “any update benefits from a second review before posting” (LiveWire’s policy is that contributors don’t approve their own postings).

With LiveWire’s Penny Crossland reporting recently on how social media are being used to customise news, they’re now just too embedded in knowledge work to be ignored. Guidance on their safe use is becoming essential; top news organisations’ guidelines provide a pretty good model.

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