The Media Blog: The New York Times just made life difficult for all journalists

Actually they didn’t ‘just’, it’s a reminder.

But we can’t imagine living under these conditions.

As we enter the home stretch of the presidential campaign, all of us in the newsroom should keep in mind our longstanding policies on social media. On personal social-media accounts, Times newsroom staffers should avoid editorializing, endorsing candidates or otherwise promoting their own political views.

This applies to every newsroom journalist in every department. Even if you personally are not involved in coverage of politics, our colleagues are working hard to maintain The Times’s reputation for credibility and fairness, and we should not do anything to make their jobs tougher.

While you may think of your Facebook page or other social-media platforms as a private area completely separate from your Times role, in fact everything we post online is to some degree public — and everything we do in public is likely to be associated with The Times.

If you are linking to other sources, aim to reflect a diverse collection of viewpoints. Sharing a range of news, opinions or satire from others is usually fine. But consistently linking only to one side of a debate can leave the impression that you, too, are taking sides.

As I’ve noted before, people following Times newsroom staffers online expect them to be well-informed and thoughtful. But we should leave the editorializing to our colleagues on the Opinion side.

Essentially: You can’t express your opinion because enemies are all around who will attribute it to your employer, as if they are too daft to know the difference between the personal and the published.

And if you want to share your opinion at all, make sure that you share the ones you want to and believe it, as well as the ones you don’t want to share and don’t believe in. Because, journalist.

Isn’t this the professional encroaching into the personal’s space? And isn’t this on many levels an encroachment on speech freedoms?

We despair, because when the world’s paper of record speaks, it won’t be too long before the new gold standard for journalism is set.

On top how much?

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