There’s one golden rule of social media for journalists — if you wouldn’t write it in the newspaper or say it on TV, don’t send it out on Twitter. And one journalist who didn’t follow the rule went on CNN over the weekend to offer some advice for others.
A week ago, Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise tweeted — from his Post account — that Steeler’s QB Ben Roethlisberger would get a five game suspension, instead six games as reported. He said he sent the tweet to prove the point for his radio show that wrong information spreads quickly on the web without much fact-checking. But in a twist of irony, it was quickly fact-checked and the Post slapped him with a one-month suspension.
“What the hell were you thinking?” asked Howard Kurtz in an interview with Wise on CNN’s Reliable Sources (watch video). At first, Wise provided a few excuses: he was multitasking live on the radio, Twitter crashed after his first tweet — but he admitted “if I waited one second to say I was joking, it was too long.”
“If there’s anything that I did learn from this, it’s as much as they want you to be personable now in the newsroom, as much as they want you to show something of yourself through a Twitter account…. a lot of people were taking me serious, they’re were taking the Washington Post serious. And if I could take myself that seriously, I wouldn’t have had that problem,” Wise said. “(It took) fifteen seconds to type, and 19 to 20 years is undone like that.” A very good lesson for all journalists learning the new world of social media.
