The Medium Doesn’t Matter

Today, word leaked out that the BBC has issued new guidelines on how their writers should be conducting themselves on Twitter. While guidelines like these are nothing new, the restrictions they place on reporters are noteworthy for such a large organization. In fact, the guidelines seem to contradict the very purpose of a news organization: writing about and breaking news. Specifically, BBC staffers are no longer allowed to break news via Twitter.

This is hardly the first media organization to do this. The guidelines follow closely on the heels of similar guidelines set out by Sky News yesterday. Both companies seem to believe that gathering people on their sites and recording precious unique page views is a more important goal than building up the personal brands of their authors, and more important than breaking news as it happens. This may pay dividends in the short term, but is very risky in the long term.

To be fair, it is understandable that these companies would want the staffers to focus their attention on original scoops for the main site, rather than posting it on their personal Twitter accounts. In fact, that should be common sense thing above everything else, as scoops take a while to nurture and it would be a waste of hours of double-checking facts to just tweet it. (For example, if I had tweeted our scoop about Vimeo earlier this week before the story was published, Erin and Sarah would have been ticked off).

That being said, there is a distinction between scoops and breaking news. If it is a scoop that the writer has worked hard on for weeks, then it would be a major waste of time to tweet it out minutes before publication. However, breaking news is not a scoop. Breaking news is something that just happened, but which isn’t exclusive to that particular member of the media. In this case, the news will be tweeted by someone else, and then retweeted, and will continue to flow, while the original tweeter gets a large portion of the credit.

In the above scenario, the BBC reporter that could have broken the news first had to wait, while a longer story is written up on the BBC. In that time period of a few minutes, other news outlets have written up a two line post, their reporters have already broken the news, and the BCC would have lost the momentum. A serious problem, when you multiply this story by hundreds of breaking events over time. If you are hunting page views or just want to build the brand, it’s bad either way.

The real flaw in the BBC’s policies is that they are treating their presence on the official BBC website as more important than the presence they have on Twitter. If a story is tweeted or retweeted from the official BBC twitter account, or from a reporter’s account without a link to a full story, does that diminish the brand? No. In all likelihood, it enhances the brand, as the authors all gain more followers, and people eventually look to them for updates on the story. Updates that would presumably be linking to the longer BBC story, published two minutes later.

You see, the medium doesn’t matter anymore. That’s what the internet did to the media world, and misunderstanding this is one of the (many) reasons why old publications are faltering. Whether the news is published on Twitter or on Facebook or on the website first, it doesn’t matter. Eventually, news should be published on all platforms. In the first moments of a story, though, all the reader wants is the news, and they want it now. If the BBC doesn’t understand this, people will start to look elsewhere for the breaking news, and it will end up hurting the BBC.

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Zenna

The BBC is a public entity and probably couldn't care less if someone breaks the news first. They have a duty to report reliable information.

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James

I'm sure the BBC will still announce breaking news on their main Twitter accounts, but it is not surprising that they don't want their writers and announcers going rogue and tweeting stories that they haven't had a chance to verify yet. If a BBC reporter tweets about, for example, a dead celebrity twitter hoax, before that death has been confirmed, the BBC have a big problem on their hands. The BBC has built a reputation for reliable reporting. Reporters firing off news through Twitter bypasses the safeguards they use to guard that reputation. It makes them slower, but there's a reason I confirm any Twitter based 'Breaking News' with the BBC before I believe it.

Murdoch

Trevor, is it BCC or BBC? Looks like Pandodaily needs an editor!

Hyokon Zhiang (@slowblogger)

Not sure. It's unclear in the article, but BBC may have been worried more or as much about a reporter tweeting a news on a personal account vs. on BBC account than Twitter vs. long-form media. And I think it is reasonable to have a guideline on that. On the Twitter vs. long-form media issue, I think it's up to their strategy. Not everyone needs to compete on speed.

Glenn Hansen

Of course, the medium does matter, or we'd all just be on Twitter. I do agree with your observation that the BBC is wrong here, and you make good distinctions between "breaking" and "scoop." But news is far more than just about breaking. And the medium matters because many news consumers do want much more than just breaking. In fact, the "breaking" of news on Twitter has been proven to be in-accurate, to say the least. An insightful post, and I thank you for writing it. Because, to me, this medium matters, too.

Joe Ward (@joewardpr)

I don't know, Trevor. If they tweet breaking news without a link, followers are likely to Google it. Since it's "breaking news" and not a "scoop", they may (i.e. probably will) end up finding what they are looking for elsewhere and potentially tweet an alternative source. Even places like Reddit or avid non-professional readers could have written about the story on G+ (for example) before the BBC gets there and it would turn up in the SERPs. I'm not sure how much credit someone gets for breaking news via Twitter without a link. I guess it may help them start off a chain of RTs, but this is likely to be people with a very big audience already (like a Scoble or Arrington in our field). I'm more inclined to wait for the link, or find it and then tweet it out myself. I often credit whomever first put me on the story, but on Twitter I don't think people are going to put that much effort into doing so. At least from what I can see, people make very little effort to even grab the @username of people they are referencing in a story most of the time. So are there advantages in *waiting* on breaking news? Maybe. What if the audience following a particular journalist doesn't happen to be following the other sources that break the same news earlier? Even if another journalist gets there first, those particular followers won't know anything about it until the journalist "they do follow" gets the article posted and tweeted. By tweeting too early, you stand the chance of driving them off to competitive news sources. If they instead adopted something like your PandoDaily ticker - so they could rapidly summarize the breaking news - then they could tweet it out and still channel the traffic back to their home site without immediately pushing those readers off to their competitors.

Kris Holt

Spot on, Trevor. The BBC's an odd case, since it's publicly funded. I'd have thought brand- and trust-building would have been more important to it, but I guess since it's started displaying ads to those not in Britannia, it wants more page views and more of that juicy ad revenue.