An Associated Press (AP) reporter has been reprimanded for comments on his Facebook page, according to Wired News. Richard Richtmyer, a Philadelphia-based newsman, posted a comment on his Facebook profile late last month criticising the executive management of newspaper publisher McClatchy, whose stock plummeted following a 2006 acquisition of San Jose-based Knight Ridder.
“It seems like the ones who orchestrated the whole mess should be losing their jobs or getting pushed into smaller quarters,” Richtmyer wrote on May 28. “But they aren’t.” Richtmyer was officially reprimanded on Tuesday.
AP union members are now demanding that the organisation should clarify its ethics guidelines and are also urging reporters to watch who they add to their friends lists. “We have seen about six Facebook problems over the last two months, with employees — maybe managers you have as friends — reporting potential issues to management,” union guild chief Kevin Keane wrote in a memo to union members last week. “You must be careful who you allow on as friends.”
Some more details from Wired: [Link]
McClatchy, like countless other newspaper publishers, happens to be a member of the AP’s newsgathering cooperative. Had the comment been uttered in real life, it likely would have dissipated into the rank air of a Philly journo bar. But Richtmyer had some 51 AP colleagues as Facebook friends, some of them higher up in the AP food chain. One turned out to be a “mole” — Richtmyer’s description — and the reporter was given a firm talking-to by AP management, who put a reprimand letter in his employment file.
Paul Colford, a spokesman for New York-based AP, declined in an e-mail to address Richtmyer’s case. But he said that “guidance offered to AP staff is that participation on Twitter and Facebook must conform with AP’s News Values and Principles.” That ethics policy says writers “must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP’s reputation as an unbiased source of news. They must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum.”
The News Media Guild, which represents about 1,000 AP reporters around the U.S., is crying foul, suggesting that the AP’s ethics policy is a blunt instrument when it comes to semipublic internet spaces like Facebook, where default privacy settings make comments like Richtmyer’s available only to a small circle of friends. The union is asking the AP to fine-tune its policy, and to reverse Richtmyer’s reprimand.
The minidrama is an increasingly familiar one as companies and workers navigate the landscape defined by sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Firings and reprimands over postings to social networking sites have become commonplace over the last year.
