Why journalists should break news on Twitter

In February 2012 both Sky News and the BBC told their journalists not to break news on Twitter first. Writing on the BBC’s Editors blog, social media editor Chris Hamilton granted the platform’s value but set the priority plainly: important information had to reach BBC colleagues, and through them the audience, as quickly as possible, “and certainly not after it reaches Twitter”. His narrower point, made on his own account the same day, was that the corporation had technology letting a reporter transmit text to newsroom systems and to a personal Twitter account simultaneously — so the guidance was not asking anyone to hold a story back. The question he said he was answering was the best way to break news across every platform the BBC ran, social networks included, rather than whether to tweet at all.

The tension the guidance exposed was structural: a hierarchical media system in the hands of a few colliding with a networked one open to everybody. The reasons for wanting to control the flow are understandable, because news organisations had historically been the gatekeepers, deciding what is news, how to report it, and when and how to release it. A platform open to everyone does not wait for that decision, and the argument against the policy was that it assumed a monopoly that no longer existed. Nicola Bruno’s paper for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism had already traced the emergence of Twitter as a breaking-news network, and the first word of natural disasters had repeatedly arrived there before it arrived anywhere else.

The case that mattered was recent. The death of Osama bin Laden reached a wide audience when the New York Times reporter Brian Stelter retweeted Keith Urbahn, chief of staff to the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had written that a reputable person had told him bin Laden had been killed. The message travelled because a journalist with a large following passed it on — which is precisely the mechanism a policy of tweeting last gives up.

The positive case for tweeting was about credibility rather than speed. Readers who have heard that something happened will wonder why the reporter they follow at the BBC or Sky News has said nothing; in a stream full of rumour and speculation, a message from a known newsroom is the one people weigh most heavily, and it pulls attention towards the broadcast and the website rather than away from them. The reach of a message on a distributed network grows with every retweet, which makes the tweet a service to audiences who are not on the platform at all. Put that way, the case for a newsroom breaking news there is not a concession to the platform but an extension of the job of being a reliable source.

Rory Cellan-Jones, then the BBC’s technology correspondent, put the position more cautiously in a post of his own, describing the profession as feeling its way forward through the fog of a new media landscape. Some would want the clock turned back to a time when power sat with the news desk, only star reporters got a byline, and sharing anything before the presses rolled or the bulletin began was a sacking offence — and, he concluded, it was almost certainly too late for that. Alfred Hermida, who made the argument against the guidance, disclosed 16 years at the BBC and working relationships with both men.