Reuters Discourages Breaking News on Twitter
Reuters recently released an update to their handbook with a section on "Reporting from the Internet and using social media." In addition to basic commonsense guidelines, one message stood out: Don't scoop the wire.
Many reporters currently use Twitter as both a reporting tool and service for getting out breaking news faster. But Reuters wants their journalists to be very clear one on thing, you shouldn't be breaking stories before they go out on the wire.
It seems like pretty good advice, right? Why undercut the basic premise of their business by spilling their ledes all over Twitter, right?
It's a good short-term policy, protecting the core of their business, but ultimately real-time services like Twitter are going to really give old-fashioned newswires a run for their money. Sure, the amount of reporting you can squeeze into 140 characters is minimal, but for getting breaking news out fast and to a large number of people, social media is remarkably effective.
Reuters obviously understands this. The fact that they're addressing social media in any official capacity at all shows that they're at least in step with the direction media is headed. But when "scooping the wire" on Twitter is a real danger to your business, it seems like it's time to start thinking about the future of "the wire" and how their business model can be extended to work with social media networks to develop new forms of news delivery.
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