Anthony De Rosa

In an attempt to shoehorn the social media genie back into the bottle, Sky News has told its reporters they cannot retweet non-Sky sources and must not stray from the topic area or beat that they cover when posting tweets on their Twitter accounts. Not only does this make for a staid and boring feed, but it also puts Sky News reporters at a significant competitive disadvantage to places like Reuters, where we have reporters verifying and tweeting out sources of news from all over the web and from many different news outlets.

Their own boss @RupertMudoch doesn’t even follow these new rules, he frequently references news organizations outside of his own, as @RossNeumann points out. The idea here at Reuters when it comes to social media is to be the beacon for all news, which makes us the go-to source, no matter what the source may be, after being put through our own filters of verification. I’ve written before about how important it is for my own company, Reuters, to be careful if they try to tread in these same waters.

There are occasions where we may share a bit of news or simply cite what other folks on Twitter are saying as a retweet, which in Twitter parlance is an act of quoting someone. It doesn’t imply an endorsement or even an acknowledgement that it is a statement of fact. It is an act of stating, “look here at what this person is saying.”

Sky should take care and make sure that their journalists are not spreading lies and misinformation. This is the first rule of journalism — but that is not what these policies are about and don’t help to enforce. Sky News Digital News Editor Neal Mann, who goes by @fieldproducer on Twitter, is someone I consider a far-off friend, someone I was lucky enough to meet recently and have known over Twitter for some time. We also share many other friends who met Neal through Twitter because he’s become such a trusted and reliable source of news in many different areas and topics. So many people appreciate Neal that they’ve even created a hashtag to protest the new rules that Sky has put into place: #savefieldproducer.

These new rules will hamstring Neal and make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to continue to do what he did to garner so much appreciation from people like me. I suspect Sky will come to their senses and realize the error of their ways. If not, they’re going to lose one of their best ambassadors in Neal, and I would suspect many people working at Sky may wonder if they’re working for an organization that is writing policies that will drive them into obsolescence.

For another good take on this, check out Mathew Ingram’s post for Gigaom, and Cory Bergman for BreakingNews.com

Elana Zak did a nice job putting together a Storify of the reaction to this news on social media.

Update 2/8: BBC tells their journalists not to break news on Twitter, but now claims, that’s not entirely accurate. I Storify’d what BBC had to say about their new policy here.

I am pleased to announce that Matthew Keys will be joining Reuters as our Deputy Social Media Editor. He will produce online content for Reuters.com; expand our presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and on new platforms; and play a key role in helping to train Reuters journalists on best practices in social media.

Matthew is well known in social media circles as a reliable source for news and was recently nominated for an Online News Association award in the category of “Breaking News excellence” for his coverage of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

Matthew is a recognized leader in helping journalists turn social media into valuable reporting tools. His online tools—a journalists guide for Tumblr, a guide for finding breaking news video on YouTube, as well as a guide for finding breaking news images on Twitter –have helped many journalists taking their first steps into social media.

Before joining Reuters, Matthew was  an online content producer and manager for KTXL FOX40, a Tribune Broadcasting television station in Sacramento, and an online news producer for KGO-TV, the ABC affiliate in San Francisco, California.

Matthew will be based in New York and report to me. Please join me in welcoming him to Reuters.

I spoke to Christy Tanner, EVP and GM of TVGuide.com to talk about the rise of Social TV and discuss if it can truly transform how we watch television.

Imagine you’re a reporter and you suddenly witness a major news event occurring right before your eyes. Do you snap it to the wire, file a story to your website, or tweet it out to your followers? If you’re at the AP, you damn well better not choose the latter.

In a perfect world, you’d want to do all the above, though your employer is going to likely want you to do the first two before you tweet. Today, Reuters is a lot more than just a wire service. We’ve built — and are continuing to build — what we think is the world’s greatest news website, in the form of Reuters.com, and part of that is providing our readers with reliable and timely news, information, opinion and analysis.

An extension of that website is the information we post on our social media accounts, at Google+, Twitter and on Facebook. We’re not just reporting our own news there, but have become a beacon for all news, being as comprehensive as possible so readers come to us first for all they need to know. We’ve got things like Counterparties, created by Ryan McCarthy and Felix Salmon that does a great job at bringing news from around the web to our readers.

The wire is still a huge part of our business and always will be. However, acting in a way that handcuffs us from doing our best work on Reuters.com and on social networks, which help drive traffic and extend our brand, is writing a death sentence for us as a future media company. To bury our head in the sand and act like Twitter (and who knows what else comes into existence next month or five years from now?) isn’t increasingly becoming the source of what informs people in real-time is ridiculous.

In order to compete with these new and existing technologies, our wire will need to increasingly become better and faster, not only for our subscribers but for the reporters using it to file reports. The fact that it is easier to fire off a Tweet than it is to snap a wire report is unacceptable. Having a policy where you’re asked never to post something on Twitter before it goes out over the wire will put us at a competitive disadvantage, as other news organizations develop a reputation for being the first to report accurately all the news that matters. As my esteemed colleague Robert MacMillan points out: “in some cases, the tweet before the scoop might be the only way to beat your competitor if your competitor has no restrictions on tweeting,” and “when a news outlet tells a reporter, “don’t tweet first,” in some cases that means that news outlet has lost the edge.”

The institutional brand building you create by having your journalists be great on social platforms cannot be underestimated. Part of having your journalists on these platforms is giving them the freedom to be a normal human being, not a robot, a PR machine or a slave to the wire. Do we want to serve the wire above all, since our paying customers deserve to get that information first? Yes, we do. But we can do that without sacrificing the incredible value we create by making ourselves a must-follow on all social networks because of the information we provide and two way conversations we can have with our readers. We can only do that if we’re not tied down by rules that ignore the reality of the present and the future of media.

Our direct competitors and two guys in a basement somewhere are already developing tools to be the next generation newsroom. If we’re not busy doing the same thing, we’re dead.

I use a variety of social tools to monitor, verify and report news. In this video I demonstrate a few of the ones I use most often: Tweetdeck, Storyful, Storify and ScribbleLive.