By Tonie Auer
DFW Chapter President

We hear about it all the time: social media. Everyone wants to know how to harness its power and rein it in for more readers. If it helps promote your publication, industry or personnel, it seems like a great idea, right?

Well, not if it is a drag on your resources without the payoff. To that end, Reuters set up social media principles and guidelines. “The rise of social media has brought journalists some powerful new storytelling and information-gathering tools. However, with these new opportunities have come some new risks,” the blog post states.

According to the site:

At Reuters, we have just published some social media guidelines that lay out some basic principles and offer recommendations that should prove useful as journalists navigate what can sometimes seem a chaotic landscape.

In building the new guidelines, we’ve embraced some basic principles:

• We encourage the use of social media approaches in Reuters journalism.
• Accuracy, freedom from bias and independence are fundamental to our reputation. These values and the Trust Principles apply to journalism produced using social media just as they have to all other journalism produced by Reuters.

Has your staff taken the initiative to set up social media guidelines? Why or why not? How important is it? For those of us with limited resources, it could be really important.