LA MEDIACIÓN ESCOLAR: ANTECEDENTES Y MODELOS

Of the pitfalls which have been previously discussed, one that seems to deserve more mention is the risk associated with producing and consuming information under an accelerated time crunch. As Boyer said, “I do think it’s like, ‘Tweet first, check later.’ So, sometimes people are quicker to tweet than to check facts.” Also, as mentioned previously, those who work for newspapers where stricter fact-checking policies are enforced, such as Stephenson, seem to be working from a disadvantageous position. He said:

A lot of times with a particular source, the particular information that I’m getting from this source is not something that we want to put out as anonymous, so [the editor will] say, “No, you can’t use that.” So what I end up doing is I end up having to credit

somebody else for breaking a story that I also could have broken. So in terms of decision- making, what Twitter forces you to do puts me at a disadvantage because it forces you to

speed up the decision-making. This guy tweeted something. Should we retweet it? Is it true? Can we confirm that? You want to react to everything.

Davidoff added, “Immediacy is a double-edged sword. I don’t think I’ve put any wrong information up, but when you hear something and you have this outlet to get it out there immediately, you might have an instinct to just put it up there and let it fly, but you have to be very careful because you don’t want to get something wrong.” Additionally, as it relates to wrong information, Elliott noted that journalists must be careful of imposters, who tweet

seemingly viable information, so as not to pass it along themselves. She gave the example of the recent NHL trade deadline on February 28, 2011, when an imposter posed as ESPN hockey writer Pierre LeBrun and disseminated false trade details, causing LeBrun to fittingly change his user name to @Real_ESPNLeBrun. Though journalists should not be held responsible for wrong information that is circulated by someone posing at them, they must be careful not to pass along such information believing it to be legitimate.

Wrong information was certainly key in Wise’s tweet that got him suspended from the Washington Post last August, but, as he discussed, his trouble was related not so much to immediacy, but to another pitfall in an inconsistency of professional standards associated with Twitter. He said, “A major pitfall for me with Twitter was forgetting that—irrespective of my different media jobs—in each one, and specifically the Washington Post, whatever I do in whatever medium reflects on that job.” Though his “social media experiment” might have been appropriate had he only been a radio personality, it was judged inappropriate in his dual roles as a radio show host and newspaper columnist. Wise added, “I’m not somehow in an echo chamber when I do the radio show, and I found that out in a painful way.” Elliott added that tweets don’t

always convey the tone, explain the point, or develop the idea within a message, which

contributes to this pitfall. Buker recalled a personal experience related to this particular pitfall: As a journalist, you can be entertaining and humorous and flippant and everything else, but you have to adhere to the same professional standards that you adhere to at your newspaper. Otherwise, you’re going to get in trouble with your bosses. One time, I made a flippant comment about how tiny our sports section was lately because we weren’t selling enough ads, and I was quickly given a slap on the hand about that and told not to make fun of my newspaper on my Twitter page. So I learned my lesson.

Wise explained this pitfall as a tension between a readership that “expects you to be serious” and a platform that “forces you not to take yourself so seriously.” He said, “For some of us in this business, we need to understand that why people still pick up the printed newspaper or click us online is because after all the pablum that’s out there, they still want real news and serious stuff sometimes, and you can tear down your own brand if you’re not careful.”

Another pitfall that has been previously touched upon is the extended workday that Twitter creates for sports journalists. Buker explained the predicament that he believes most print journalists find themselves in at the moment: “Because of all the cutbacks and layoffs and

buyouts in our business and the overriding feeling that management gives us that, ‘Gee, we’re lucky to have jobs in print journalism,’ you almost feel obligated to work the extra hours even though maybe you’re not getting paid for them. I know at my newspaper—I’m not saying I have a terrifically hard job—but sometimes you work a lot more hours than they’re paying you for, but it’s just sort of part of the business.” Holder added the sentiment that once you begin spending that extra time on Twitter, there is no going back. He said, “The people who are the most thirsty for that information can get it at the drop of a hat, and you can give it to them at the

drop of a hat. So it really does satisfy that, and I would add to that, that I think people are more thirsty for that than ever before, because there is so much of it out there that there’s an

expectation for more and more information.”

Additionally, Holder and Jones forwarded the notion that Twitter, while introducing people to a larger variety of information, may be limiting the amount of information they

consume on a deeper-than-surface level. Holder said that he believes Twitter probably causes all who use it, for journalistic purposes and otherwise, to “read a little less.” While Jones added, “I don’t know how often people are actually clicking links that they see on Twitter, beyond getting their news in 140-character bytes and reading headlines, instead of actual content. I can see that as being kind of dangerous in just getting the news that you want, instead of the full story with the full context.” She said that she regularly fields questions on Twitter that are answered within the links included in particular tweets, but, because some, lazy readers do not click through to the links to read larger stories or blog posts, they do not know that the answers are there.

One final pitfall introduced by several of the journalists is the learning curve involved, which can be associated with any new technology. As Elliott noted, the demographic for Twitter seems to “skew kind of young,” so that may put older journalists at a disadvantage. For instance, Wise answered a question about the large volume of replies to mentions by readers on his

Twitter feed, as opposed to other types of messages, by stating, “I hate to admit this, but I didn’t really know what the mentions thing meant, and so I was sort of one of these ignoramuses where I didn’t really know how people were responding to me or who was responding to me… So lately I’ve just found out what the mentions thing meant in the last month or so.” Furthermore, Davidoff illustrated how such miscues are not always related to not having learned about the technology, but also not paying full attention all of the time: “You can occasionally screw up. I

almost put my cell phone [number] on Twitter, because I thought I was responding to a direct message with somebody. I was responding on my cell phone… and the next thing I knew, I got two or three phone calls from strangers saying, ‘Hello, is this Ken?’ And I said, ‘Oh, boy.’ It was probably up there for about a minute.” Davidoff also mentioned how he has routinely seen public tweets that were clearly meant to be private direct messages.