Bloomberg Businessweek
Go To Businessweek.com
During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Forget Adderall. Traders now pop chia seeds to stay focused and energized
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
The Associated Press caused a minor furor recently, when the news-wire service updated its social-media policy and forbade its writers from expressing opinions on Twitter, including implied opinions in the process of retweeting posts by others. In the wake of that controversy, Jeff Sonderman at the Poynter Institute has suggested that journalists could use their own Twitter shorthand to prevent anyone from getting the wrong impression when a reporter retweets something.
As I’ve argued before, all we really have to do is admit that journalists of all kinds might have opinions, instead of trying to pretend that they don’t—or trying to force them not to.
According to the Associated Press policy (PDF link), the risk in simply retweeting comments made by others—with no disclaimer or qualifying comment—is that readers might assume that a retweet endorses whatever views have been expressed by the original poster. Many journalists on Twitter have tried to deal with this by adding a line to their Twitter bio that says “retweets are not endorsements.” Apparently this isn’t enough for the wire service.
The AP’s policy states: “Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you’re relaying [and] these cautions apply even if you say on your Twitter profile that retweets do not constitute endorsements.”
Many journalists and other media-industry observers on Twitter responded to the AP’s edict with scorn and derision, as detailed in a Storify roundup of some reactions. New York Times media writer David Carr, for example, simply said: “Good luck with that.” National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin—a pioneer of using Twitter to report on breaking news events such as the Arab Spring revolutions—said the policy was “an homage to lawyers” and suggested that he had no intention of following such a rule. Someone else said the AP was now just “hiring robots.”
In his Poynter response, Sonderman notes that putting disclaimers about retweets in a user’s bio aren’t a good answer to this problem because few readers will likely check a bio page. He suggests that journalists come up with their own shorthand for a “neutral tweet” to emphasize that they don’t agree with or endorse a comment. Since Twitter users have already come up with such conventions as MT (for “modified tweet”) and even the original RT for retweet—something that was developed by users and only later adopted by Twitter as a standard—Sonderman suggests that journalists using Twitter make NT a new code for something that doesn’t imply agreement.
