Every journalist fears that one wrong source. That source that sends your amazing, “Ahhh!”, breaking story into a catastrophic mess and taints your name and career for at least some time to come, maybe not forever.
However, there are those people that do in fact ruin their entire career and legacy. **SPOILER ALERT** In the book The Best Laid Plans by Sidney Sheldon (a personal favorite)Leslie Stewart does that unforgettable, unthinkable action of using a source, and producing her work into the media world without double checking her facts.
As Steve Fox mentions in his article “’Think before you act’ and more rules for journalists on Twitter,” all Twitter Tweeters should make sure that the article or “breaking news story” is factual. When comparing CNN’s Twitter page to CBS’s, I noticed that one does not retweet anyone, while the other only retweets its other news correspondents, editors, and Twitter handles, CNN being the latter of the two. Though both are highly renowned and credible sources for breaking news, one gets all of its own content and then allows it to be dispersed elsewhere, where CNN is fond of retweeting its other correspondents, stories, and other CNN advocates.
Another important fact that I learned about organizations and their social media usage, is that they cover a very wide variety of topics, but a lot of their tweets are boring. Now I know that they do not belong to a certain type of people or that they are only here to report on certain things, but a little mix up of what they do could always help.
And yes, some of their tweets do use photo and video, but a majority is still stuck in the past of straight text articles.
Wilson Fulk 