LA Times Twitter Guidelines Announced

Los Angeles Times staffers have been warned: the Twitterverse isn't safe. Editor Russ Stanton and assistant managing editor Henry Fuhrmann have issued new guidelines governing the use of social media like Twitter and Facebook. They include:

• Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job.

• Assume that your professional life and your personal life will merge online regardless of your care in separating them.

• Even if you use privacy tools (determining who can view your page or profile, for instance), assume that everything you write, exchange or receive on a social media site is public.

• Just as political bumper stickers and lawn signs are to be avoided in the offline world, so too are partisan expressions online.

The LAT is the latest in a string of publications to have issued guidelines to staff governing the use of social media. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have also published new rules, which, like the LAT's, were designed to protect the paper's objectivity in the eyes of its readers -- drawing the ire of bloggers and members of staff who saw them as overly restrictive. Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz vowed "to now hold forth only on the weather and dessert recipes."

Comments

[Andrew Latimes]

@Shirley: Thank you for the kind words. A couple more observations and links:

This post appears to have been titled more for SEO than the topic at hand:

• Our Guidelines cover all social media (current and that not yet invented), not just Twitter.

• http://latimes.com/unhub links to 40+ social outlets that we've been experimenting with the past year.

• Is it just me, or do most of the auto-populated "LA times twitter" type search results on boxes on HuffPo return pretty irrelevant results?

As ever, any and all feedback is most welcome. ~ Andrew / @AdNys

[shirleyfeeney]

big deal. if more people followed guidelines like this, which aren't uncommon in many organizations including one that i used to work for, then there would be much fewer "accidental" posts. Rules we could ALL live by.

[Andrew Latimes]

Thank you for writing about our new Guidelines. For the record, here are links to:

- The full text of our revised Social Media Guidelines: http://latimes.com/socialmedia -- our original Guidelines were issued in March 2009, before the WaPo or WSJ (and most other major media outlets) issued theirs.

- Our directory of 200+ L.A. Times(@latimes)-related Twitter accounts: http://latimes.com/twitter

- The full text of our 2007 Ethics Guidelines (currently under revision): http://latimes.com/ethics

Hope this is helpful. I welcome all feedback.
~ Andrew Nystrom / L.A. Times social media guy / http://twitter.com/AdNys (@AdNys)