Earl Butz, the United States Secretary of Agriculture in 1976, made obscene, racist remarks
in front of entertainer Pat Boone and former White House counsel John Dean while aboard a
commercial flight to California following the Republican National Convention. Dean, who was
working for Rolling Stone at the time, used the remark in a piece and attributed it to an unnamed
cabinet officer.
Eventually, New Times magazine revealed that Butz had indeed made the remark, forcing him to
resign.
Nearly 36 years later, Bob Salladay, a senior editor at California Watch and the Center for
Investigative Reporting, was sitting on a train Jan. 19, 2012 with Santa Ana City Council
member Michele Martinez. Martinez was speaking on the phone and Salladay began tweeting
what she was saying, including that he was "99 percent sure it was Michele Martinez."
"I was tweeting a snapshot in time of what she was saying; that's how you use Twitter," Salladay
told Poynter Institute, adding that he did not feel the need to verify anything.
Radio, television and Internet revolutionized journalism in the 20th century. But, according
to several journalism experts, social media has added a dimension to journalism. Most say
journalism has changed for the better, but others like Jerry Lanson, associate professor of
journalism at Emerson College, say journalistic standards are now in question.
"The difference was, at least John Dean was known to Butz, and Butz was known to him,"
Lanson said. "If I'm working incognito and I'm tweeting what I hear when I don't even verify
that somebody is the right person, that to me is an aberration of journalistic standards."
As noted by Lanson in a Huffington Post article April 11, large, credible media organizations
have made huge mistakes by trusting information first reported on Twitter. The death of Penn
State football coach of nearly 46 years, Joe Paterno, was prematurely reported by one of Penn
State's student news sites, Onward State, leading CBSSports.com to use the story. There have
been several other cases when an inaccurate tweet has gone viral.
Radio, TV and Internet changed how information was reported, but journalism standards
remained intact through each new age, and social media does not change that, according to Sree
Sreenivasan, who was named one of Poynter's 35 social media influencers in 2010.
2
"There's always a bad side to anything that you over rely on and that you don't use carefully.
There are hundreds and thousands of examples of journalists misquoting not from social
media, from other publications, from erroneous news reports. All of that has nothing to do with
social media," said Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and professor at Columbia Journalism
School. "Media companies and journalists will continue to make mistakes. If journalists like
things black and white, social media is not a shade of gray. It's not social media that causes the
problem; it's the incorrect use of social media by journalists that cause the problems in the first
place."
Among digital news consumers, 52 percent get at least some news from Facebook and Twitter,
according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center. The study also revealed 92 percent go
directly to news websites and 85 percent use search.
Mark Luckie, who founded the digital journalism blog 10,000 Words, and authored "The Digital
Journalist's Handbook," said these statistics have merit.
"Social media has permeated so many areas of journalism and it's being used by a lot more
people, but there is still a segment of the population that doesn't use social media and an even
bigger segment that doesn't use it actively," Luckie said.
Sreenivasan agreed.
"At this particular time social media has a very important and useful place in anybody who is
modern about using this technology to get their stories out there," he said.
Schools.com, a definitive digital resource for education, revealed in an infographic that 49.1
percent of people had heard breaking news via social media that turned out to be false.
Although Wall Street Journal's Director of Social Media and Engagement Liz Heron is well
aware of social media's potential for mistakes, she said social media is another tool to tell stories
and complements radio, TV and Internet.
"The speed of information does allow inaccurate reports to get passed around, but they are also
debunked with the same speed," said Heron, who previously served as the social media editor
for The New York Times. "Since journalists are trained to approach rumors more skeptically
than perhaps the average user is, we have a role to play in vetting, verifying and, if necessary,
debunking information that becomes viral on social media."
ESPN instituted a social media policy in August 2011 that said in bold "Do not break news on
Twitter."
3
The policy said, "We want to serve fans in the social sphere, but the first priority is to ESPN
news and information efforts. Public news (i.e. announced in news conferences) can be
distributed without vetting. However, sourced or proprietary news must be vetted by the TV
or Digital news desks. Once reported on an ESPN platform, that news can (and should) be
distributed on Twitter and other social sites."
ESPN's standards remain the same for its reporters, as the policy also said, "If ESPN.com opts
not to post social content created by ESPN talent, those individuals are not permitted to report,
speculate, discuss or give opinions on sports related topics on personal platforms."
Without that stipulation for its staff, Lanson said that ESPN would lose credibility.
"Unless the standards for the staff of a news organization are in sync with the organization itself,
you're undermining the brand and you're undermining the credibility of the news organization,"
Lanson said.
Lanson said that ESPN's strategy is a good idea and the perfect system for reporting via social
media would involve some form of editing, opposed to letting a reporter tweet and report freely,
unfiltered and unverified. Sreenivasan said that most news organizations have wrongfully written
social media policies, weighing too much on the side of caution.
"Most of them are written from a position of fear of using the technology. They should not be,"
Sreenivasan said. "They should use it from a position of strength rather than a position of fear."
Luckie agreed, saying that the downsides do not outweigh the good of social media and its
impact on journalism.
Luckie called social media the "baby sister" to radio, TV and Internet.
"TV, radio and newspapers are a consumption model, whereas social media is a sharing model,"
Luckie said. "You sit back, or you watch, or you read, whereas with social you're discussing it,
you're sharing it, it's more of a big conversation."
Twitter took journalism by storm in 2007 with several events that showed journalists the value of
the new social network beyond just self-promoting stories, Luckie said.
Like many news organizations, the Hartford Courant adapted social media slowly and created a
social media coordinator position in 2010 for Patrick Parker. Parker's co-worker, Dom Amore,
offered his perspective on using social media as the UConn men's basketball beat writer.
4
Amore said that everyone who works at the Courant or at Channel 61 is required to tweet three to
four times per day, including editors or behind-the-scenes people.
"It has become part of our culture," he said.
Amore added that Twitter has great value as a personal branding tool, allowing beat writers to
reach an audience outside of the newspapers' print audience.
"If you cover the Giants for the Bergen Record, in the past, you probably would not have
been very well-read or known outside of Bergen County," Amore said. "But now, that person
potentially could have followers all over the world, especially all over the tri-state area. It's a
tremendous promotional tool, and really broadens the traffic you can generate."
But is Twitter too fast for journalism? Amore stood firmly on Lanson's side, saying that
reporters need to be responsible with what they publish online.
"The immediacy of it brings the responsibility with it and the danger with it. Very often
today, "breaking a story" means tweeting a story first," he said. "Because there is a tendency
to jump the gun, the tendency to believe that you can tweet falsely and correct it later it will
disappear. Even if you take the tweet down, it's been retweeted and it's out there. It's been
more important for traditional journalists to separate themselves from those who don't have that
background by using Twitter responsibly."
Amore added that the biggest danger of Twitter is when a journalist loses control of himself, he
or she can still tweet without an editor's approval.
"A journalist can go out and have a few too many drinks and start tweeting stuff, and get himself
or herself in a lot of trouble," Amore said. "That's not something you had to worry about when it
was just print or the website, because there was a filter there. There's no filter with Twitter."