The Asso­ci­ated Press issued the fol­low­ing pol­icy to its employ­ees on June 23, 2009.

Social net­work­ing Q&A

Is it OK for AP employ­ees to have accounts on such social-networking sites as Face­book and Twitter?

Absolutely. They’ve become an inte­gral part of every­day life for mil­lions of peo­ple around the world, and the AP already has a robust corps of employ­ees with accounts on all the social net­works. These net­works also have become an impor­tant tool for AP reporters to gather news – both for big, break­ing sto­ries and in cases in which we’re seek­ing out mem­bers of the pub­lic who might serve as sources for our sto­ries. And they’re a prime source of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism mate­r­ial. One of our top images from the US Air­ways crash in the Hud­son River, for instance, was a photo taken by a civil­ian that first sur­faced on Twitter.

What are the gen­eral guide­lines for such accounts?

Employ­ees must iden­tify them­selves as being from the AP if they are using the net­works for work in any way. Post­ing mate­r­ial about the AP’s inter­nal oper­a­tions is pro­hib­ited on employ­ees’ per­sonal pages, and employ­ees also should avoid includ­ing polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions in their pro­files and steer clear of mak­ing any post­ings that express polit­i­cal views or take stands on con­tentious issues. Employ­ees should be mind­ful that any per­sonal infor­ma­tion they dis­close about them­selves or col­leagues may be linked to the AP’s name. That’s true even if staffers restrict their pages to view­ing only by friends. It’s not just like utter­ing a com­ment over a beer with your friends: It’s all too easy for some­one to copy mate­r­ial out of restricted pages and redi­rect it else­where for wider view­ing. As mul­ti­tudes of peo­ple have learned all too well, vir­tu­ally noth­ing is truly pri­vate on the Internet.

Any­thing spe­cific to Facebook?

It’s a good idea to mon­i­tor your pro­file page to make sure mate­r­ial posted by oth­ers doesn’t vio­late AP stan­dards; any such mate­r­ial should be deleted. Also, man­agers should not issue friend requests to sub­or­di­nates, since that could be awk­ward for employ­ees. It’s fine if employ­ees want to ini­ti­ate the friend process with their bosses.

How about Twitter?

We’re still the AP. Don’t report things or break news that we haven’t pub­lished, no mat­ter the for­mat, and that includes retweet­ing uncon­firmed infor­ma­tion not fit for AP’s wires. Feel free to link to AP mate­r­ial that has been pub­lished. It’s dif­fi­cult for most peo­ple to link to AP Mobile sto­ries right now, so link to mem­ber and cus­tomer sites instead and try to vary the links to spread the traf­fic around. It’s a good idea to ref­er­ence the AP in the promo lan­guage, i.e. Just how much geek can be chic? Test your fash­ion IQ with this inter­ac­tive game (AP): http://bit.ly/BvAqv . Also, when tweet­ing, remem­ber that’s there a big dif­fer­ence between pro­vid­ing an obser­va­tion (“I nearly bumped into Chris Matthews out­side Penn Sta­tion”) and an opin­ion (“I nearly bumped into the loud­mouthed and obnox­ious Chris Matthews”).

Why does the AP care or think it should have a say in what I put on my social net­work­ing feed/page?

We all have a stake in uphold­ing the AP’s rep­u­ta­tion for fair­ness and impar­tial­ity, which has been one of our chief assets for more than 160 years. These guide­lines do not break new ground – they are con­sis­tent with the rest of our State­ment of News Val­ues and Prin­ci­ples. They just take into account the new real­i­ties of the social­net­work­ing world and answer ques­tions that many AP employ­ees have asked.

Do these guide­lines apply just to AP employ­ees who are journalists?

They apply to all employ­ees, just as the State­ment of News Val­ues and Prin­ci­ples does. We can­not expect peo­ple out­side the AP to know whether a post­ing on Face­book was made by some­one who takes pic­tures, processes pay­roll checks or fixes satel­lite dishes. We all rep­re­sent the AP, and we all must pro­tect its reputation.

Related

• A list of social media poli­cies at cor­po­ra­tions, news orga­ni­za­tions and non­prof­its