Who owns a journalist’s Twitter account?

When Laura Kuenssberg left BBC News for ITV News in September 2011, she took a political correspondent’s job with her and left a question behind: who owned the almost 60,000 people following @BBCLauraK? The following had been built on a mix of news, commentary and colour — the reporter’s material rather than the employer’s — and there was no settled practice for what happened to it.

The Guardian’s suggestion was pragmatic: rather than hand the old account login back to the BBC and start from scratch with a new ITV account, the sensible move was to change the name of the account. That is not what happened. Kuenssberg began from zero as @ITVLauraK, and announced the move from the BBC-branded account she was about to give up — which is as neat an illustration of the problem as the episode produced.

The underlying difficulty is that the account was never cleanly institutional in the first place. Social platforms gave journalists something no news product could replicate: a direct, personal channel to an audience, used on their own initiative and in their own voice. Even when an account carries an employer’s name, the tweets tend to carry the reporter’s personality, and the traditional boundary between professional and personal output blurs. The State of the Media report had identified the direction of travel two years earlier, in 2009: through search, email, blogs and social media, consumers were gravitating towards the work of individual writers and voices and away somewhat from institutional brand. A handle that belongs to an institution but is followed for a person sits on exactly that fault line.

Set against that is an unresolved tension between the journalist and the institution, sharpest on a service which, as Jemima Kiss pointed out, was designed for individuals to communicate rather than for organisations to broadcast. An employer can require the handle back; what it cannot require is that the audience stay. A journalist who starts a new account under a new masthead is likely to arrive with most of the old following intact, which makes ownership of the handle a weaker claim than it looks on paper — and which is why the conclusion drawn at the time was that media institutions may have to accept they cannot own their reporters’ accounts.

That specific handle stopped mattering long ago. The question underneath it did not close. Newsroom social media policies still have to decide whether a reporter’s account is a work asset or a personal one, and whether a following built on the employer’s time transfers with the reporter; the answer still tends to be settled case by case, at the point somebody resigns.