Journalism professors Susana Herrera and José Luis Requejo drew up ten guidelines for newsrooms using Twitter, published in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies. They built the list from the academic literature and from studying the official accounts of the New York Times, the BBC, the Washington Post and National Public Radio. The premise was that social platforms had become part of the reporting kit while outlets kept approaching Web 2.0 services with a 1.0 mindset.
The ten practices were: have a voice that is credible and reliable but also personal and human; be generous with retweets and credit others; link to external material rather than simply broadcasting your own; listen and respond; provide information that adds value; seek out the views of users; promote the most interesting and useful content for audiences; use hashtags the Twitter community has created rather than inventing them; include multimedia with tweets; and link out to other networks where a conversation is already happening.
Each guideline in the paper came with example tweets showing how particular news organisations had put it into practice.