Six Times An Hour

This morning, I had a thirty minute phone conversation with an editorial manager at Reuters and a representative of Thomson Reuters human resources. I was told my employment with the company was terminated.

There were several reasons that led Reuters to terminate my employment this morning:

– Reuters claims that during my coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, I violated a grievance aired by the company in a written warning issued in October 2012, explicitly that the company “must see immediate improvement in your communication with managers and more discretion in your social media practices.” (The company does not define what “more discretion” is). You can read the full warning here.

– Reuters claims that the same activity violated the company’s “Trust Principles.” You can read those Trust Principles here.

Reuters said it had a problem with the perceived relationship between my Twitter account and their news organization. A Reuters manager said it was troublesome that several people associated my work on Twitter with the company, pointing to my Twitter bio that said I was a Reuters journalist. Reuters’ Twitter Guidelines, which you can read here (this is not an internal document), states that Reuters journalists are always expected to identify themselves as such.

That is a Catch 22 for me. On one hand, I could have removed information from my Twitter bio that said I was a Reuters employee while I was on suspension. However, that would have violated the company’s Twitter guidelines, and would have also violated the October warning that said I failed to identify myself as a Reuters journalist when on Twitter. Instead, I left the bio alone, which the company says created a perception that my work was associated with the company — even when Reuters has released statements and news reports to the contrary.

Reuters acknowledges I complied with their guideline of identifying myself as a Reuters journalist, and a manager acknowledged that the company cannot police perception on Twitter. But the company said it was still enough of a reason to terminate my employment.

I was told Reuters also disagreed with my practice of relaying on Twitter what was broadcast on emergency scanner traffic during a 10-hour period of coverage from Thursday evening to Friday morning.

Reuters said they particularly disagreed with my decision to continue tweeting scanner traffic after several other news organizations had reported a request from the Boston Police Department to not tweet information heard on scanner traffic.
I’ve stated before I was unaware of several media reports sourcing law enforcement regarding scanner traffic. As soon as I learned about the reports, I erred on the side of caution and stopped tweeting information heard over the scanner.

It’s unclear if any law enforcement official or agency reached out to Reuters to make the same request reported by other news organizations, but Reuters has made it clear that it does not need to independently reach out to law enforcement before complying with a request — if CBS News reports it, that’s good enough for Reuters.

Reuters also says tweets that contained “erroneous” information from the wire was “recklesss.” I told the company my tweets were sourced to police and/or dispatch audio. When I asked the manager on call what information was incorrect, the manager was unable to say. I offered to send the company recordings of the dispatch audio from Friday morning so they could match it with information in my tweets. The company, so far, has not taken me up on this offer.

To recap:

– Reuters is mad I tweeted information from scanner traffic, though the company admits it is unaware if a law enforcement agency contacted them with a request to stop.

– Reuters is mad that supposed “erroneous” information moved on my Twitter account, though the information was appropriately sourced. Any information that wasn’t initially correct, or later turned out to be incorrect (including reports by other news organizations that I aggregated on Twitter), were later corrected with a subsequent tweet, which complies with the company’s Twitter guidelines. (Other Reuters journalists tweeted information that later turned out to be untrue).

– Reuters is mad that I identified myself as a Reuters journalist, because it apparently gave some sort of perception that my work over the past week reflected on the company. Their own policy requires I identify myself as a Reuters journalist. The company has said multiple times that I was suspended from work.

– Reuters is mad that a small percentage of my readers, and readers of other publications, may have assumed my work last week was done on behalf of their news agency, though Reuters has published news articles and issued statements to reports saying I was suspended and not working on behalf the company. They also acknowledge that perception is something they can’t really control, but they’re still mad about it.

I am represented by a union. The union tells me they will be filing a grievance. I don’t have plans to provide play-by-play of that process, but it will take a long time.

After I got off the phone with the company this morning, I tweeted the news that I had been fired. I figured it would be better if the news came from me instead of, say, a Huffington Post reporter.

Immediately, social journalists and news organizations drew a parallel between my firing and a criminal indictment that came down last month. While my suspension was related to the indictment, it’s unclear if my firing had anything to do with it. The company mentioned the suspension several times, but they did not mention the case nor did they mention the indictment.

Still, one has to wonder if they are connected. A company doesn’t typically clear off your desk (as was reported by Reuters) if they have plans to let you return to work. The Tribune Company, at the heart of the indictment that came down last month, is one of Reuters’ largest media clients. The suspension has been political from the start.

I’m fine, though. I still love my colleagues at Reuters. Working there has made me a better journalist. The fourteen months I was employed at 3 Times Square were, so far, the best of my career. My career goal was to make it to the east coast, and my boss took a chance on this goober in San Francisco when he offered me the job last year. For that, I’ll always be tremendously grateful.

True, there were critics of the way I covered last week’s events in Boston, but many other followers on Twitter and Facebook have lauded the coverage, and that means more to me than anything a media pundit writes.

I’ve been in the unemployment boat before. It’s led to better things. A few people have already reached out to me with possible job offers since this morning.

Many people have been glued to local television coverage of the Boston Marathon bomb blasts since Monday. If you live outside of the Boston metropolitan area, you might have watched one of the four local television stations to stream their broadcasts over the Internet.

If you’re like me, you might be wondering why two stations — ABC affiliate WCVB and NBC affiliate WHDH — stream their coverage with closed captioning.

The reason can be found within the “Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010.” The FCC regulation is complex, but it basically states that most programs that air on television with closed captioning availability must also be captioned when delivered on the Internet.

Programs that are pre-recorded and aired on television after September 30, 2012 must also have closed captioning available when published online. Programs that are streamed online by a broadcast outlet must also make closed captioning available if it is a simulcast of a “live or near live” program aired on television after March 30, 2012.

The exception is for clips of news broadcasts or television programming, foreign programming and content edited or produced specifically for the Internet. A raw satellite feed streamed online by a TV station, but not aired on television, would generally be exempt from captioning, but a broadcast signal aired on TV — like WCVB’s coverage of the Boston Marathon blasts — would require captioning.

Read more about Internet closed captioning requirements at JDSupra Law News

There’s one question that smart, successful people ask themselves from time to time regardless of the industry they work in: “What’s next?” It’s a question that keeps professionals and individuals from becoming complacent to a fault. 

In our industry — the industry of social news — it’s the question that some of the most forward-thinking individuals ask themselves (perhaps subconsciously) to stay out front. It’s the reason why certain people — think Craig Kanalley, Anthony De Rosa, Neal Mann, Liz Heron, Jonah Peretti, Vadim Lavrusik — are called upon time and time again to offer their insights and to share their ideas.

When I started using social platforms in the beginning of 2011 to move news, the strategy was simple: Break news fast and provide rolling coverage on big news events. Virtually nobody was doing that with Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr two years ago (Google Plus didn’t make waves until mid-2011). Today, many journalists and news organizations are doing it.

In 2012, the strategy was “Access.” The goal of the strategy was this: If I had access to it, my followers should have access to it. Court documents, emergency scanner traffic audio, photos and other material would be distributed on various platforms — Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Scribd, SoundCloud and Storify, to name a few — in order to provide a bigger picture on the stories of the year.

The strategies of the past two year have paid off — from landing two jobs after being unemployed, to becoming one of the most-followed real-time/breaking news journalists on Twitter. Now I find myself asking, what’s next?

I’m going to spend 2013 refining some of the practices that have gotten me this far as it pertains to broadcasting news events on social platforms. I’ll be following these five guidelines to refine my practice and help me figure out what’s next on social media:

- Less opinion and punditry: On social media platforms, users want to broadcast their opinion, but I’ve found there’s slightly less (read: virtually no) interest in reading opinion from other people.

When I started tweeting news from my personal account back in early 2011, my direction was clear-cut — no opinion, no punditry. As my audience has grown over time, I’ve loosened up a bit, letting my thoughts on a matter slip up every now and then.  Rarely do people find my opinions, when published on a social platform, to be all that intriguing, clever or funny — usually I come off as a jerk, and sometimes they can get me into trouble.

What people want are facts and nuggets of information, not necessarily to hear someone else’s opinion (unless it validates their own). So I’m going to roll back the opinion and punditry and stick with what I feel I do best — getting information out quickly from a variety of sources.

- Aggressively source everything: Sourcing is a big problem on social media platforms. Often, content will be lifted from one platform and retransmitted on another without any source or credit to the person who created the content or the platform where it was discovered.

As it relates to journalism, social platforms should be no different from other broadcast mediums (newspaper, television, radio and most news websites). Credit should always be given where credit is due — when rebroadcasting content, it’s the least a journalist or aggregate can do to the person who wrote an article, snapped a photo, created an infographic, produced a video or discovered something great.

It’s bad practice to steal. It’s better to aggressively and properly source content back to the original creator or finder than it is to elevate one’s self as a social media rock star by ripping off people and platforms.

- More guides: “If you get it, share it.” In 2011, I wrote guides on how to find breaking news content on Twitter and on YouTube. People seemed to respond positively to them, so I decided to set aside time in 2013 to write more comprehensive guides, updating the ones from two years ago and creating new ones for new platforms and practices.

The guides will contain minimal punditry on social media, focusing instead on how to successfully mine for content, broadcast out and aggregate ideas. I hope to solicit ideas and practices some of the sharpest minds in social journalism to help bring together these guides.

- More elevation: I’m a big believer in leveraging a healthy following to elevate good projects, smart people and excellent ideas. I would not have gone from unemployed to working for the world’s largest news organization had it not been for a good network of people who saw what I was doing, liked it and elevated it to their own audience.

Going forward, elevating good people and good ideas is going to be a priority in how I practice on social platforms. Sometimes, it will be as simple as a “Follow Friday” to an individual or a brand who is doing something awesome, or it could be writing more blog entries on applications that are particularly useful to individual journalists. Or it could be something else.

- Experiment: This is likely the most important point out of the five. A person or organization figures out what’s next by collaborating, moving fast, breaking a few things, bending some rules and occasionally getting into trouble.

This year, I’m going to collaborate with some amazing people (both colleagues and competitors), try out some new practices and somewhere along the way I hope to find the next big thing (or next best way of doing things).  It’s going to be risky without being reckless, and I expect to succeed about as much as I expect to fail.

Here’s to 2013.