White House Press Secretary's Tweets Archived 63
RedTeflon writes "The White House spokesman, who has just started using Twitter, told reporters this afternoon that he met with government lawyers yesterday to determine whether his tweets would be archived along with emails and just about everything else produced at the White House. After deliberation, White House lawyers have decided that any and all tweets will be archived in keeping with the Presidential Records Act of 1978."
What are you tweeting about.... (Score:5, Informative)
It seems to me that public people might need two twitter accounts just to create the legal definition of what they're posting as part of their job (which definitely should be subject to retention policies) and what they're positing as a member of the public. Some notable policies...
MSNBC holds people accountable for what they tweet, such as what got David Schuster in trouble for recently. Basically, you can't say anything on Twitter that they wouldn't allow on the air. Keith Olbermann doesn't tweet. Rachel Maddow tweets but it's mostly limited to show previews and links to her other web posts.
ESPN orders their people not to tweet, seeing it as competition to what they do on the air. No breaking of stories before they're reported by ESPN or ESPN.com. No posting of opinions if you're paid to share your opinions on ESPN shows. If you work for them and want to blog, there's space waiting for you at ESPN.com.
CNN allowed Rick Sanchez to turn his non-distinct hour of CNN Newsroom into a signature show called "Rick's List" where they use "iReports" from people tweeting, facebooking and myspacing them in order to generate content. A consultant who wrote an unofficial bridge between the CNN Breaking News e-mail service and the CNN_brk Twitter account ended up getting a handsome reward for handing over control of the account to make it an official CNN service.
G4 one day sent around a sign-or-you're-fired notice that the on-air staff had to give the network license to republish their tweets from their personal twitter accounts. This is what enabled that little quote box on the right hand side of their webpage and nothing more, but the way it was handled with legalese before explaining what the network really meant caused some initial confusion. More or less, the staff learned not to tweet dumb things because there's a risk that might be something the web editor can grab onto now. The reason Morgan Webb's Webb Alert podcast is "suspended" is because Morgan was told to stop doing that since it competed with the The Feed segment on AOTS which up until recently was also podcast. If G4 ever gives her the green light, or she leaves the network and her new job doesn't mind the podcast is likely to return.
In all these cases, the content owners want to control what their public people tweet with information they learned as part of doing their job. Say things that help the company make money, and keep going. Say things that the bosses think cost the company money, and you'll be told to stop. Bringing this back to the topic at hand... if he's tweeting for his job then his job should keep the tweets. If he's just tweeting what he had for lunch, there's no reason to keep that around.
Re:It seems kind of pointless (Score:2, Informative)
Thats just it, you can delete tweets.