js615311@ohio.edu
I tried to resist joining Twitter once, but as I found in high school, if you’re not on Twitter, you’re out of the loop. Now in days things happen on Twitter first it seems and the rest of us figure out what happens after, by scrolling through our feeds. Everyone is reachable, I found that out the hard way as a coach of a youth swim team back home. Trying to maintain your persona as someone of authority is hard when they’re making cootie jokes about the new girlfriend they think you have. Plus there will always be cases when it seems more appropriate than others, but where is the line? In that current position as a coach there wasn’t a real for social media use, I had to make the decision.
The decision I made wound up being a personal one since there wasn’t any form of rule or guideline for me to follow. Journalist also have to make the personal decision on weather to mix their public and private lives together, or keep a clear distinction. Even more, who is appropriate to friend and not to friend? As we read in Steven Mendoza’s, To Friend or Not to Friend, we see a perfect example of what journalist face. Mendoza writes on Stuart Leavenworth’s dilemma of the possible mixing up of relationships between him and his sources. For a journalist to befriend a source or to accept a source could be seen as a compromising situation for the public. In order to maintain your unbiased appearance I think it is best to keep a distance from accepting them as friends to your personal profile. Otherwise if it appears that you are too good of friends, people may misinterpret that relationship and might accuse you of writing biased articles about that person. It could ruin your credibility. It’s best for both professionals in this case to maintain just their professional relationship in the public light.
I also feel that when it comes to mixing your public and private profiles it’s also a bad decision. I agree with a lot of what C.J. LeMaster said in, Journalist’s Dilemma, being present online as a journalist, it’s important, I think for you need to be accessible to your readers and you can be apart of the developing news that’s online as well. But allowing your audience to be friends with you on your personal profile can present you with unintended problems. I think it is important for your audience to always see you as a journalist, getting too personal with your audience can blur the lines. The only way your audience should expect you to act is as an unbiased journalist, not as their friend, not as their neighbor. They should know you’re always looking for the story, the scoop and if it happens on one of their profiles, they should know you’ll do what you have to do as a journalist.
Twitter is fair game, if you have a public profile anyone can take what you say and use it against you. If you’re a journalist and you have a public profile, the same goes for you. If you put something news worthy on your profile and another news outlet posts it on their page too, that’s fine in my book. I think Journalists should respect people’s private profiles, regardless if it’s easy to reach past that or not. If someone chose to make their profile private, to me that’s saying “everything on here you need to ask to see.”
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