Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Jodi Ruderon Assigned One More Editor

The New York Times has "Problems With a Reporter’s Facebook Posts, and a Possible Solution" in connection with Jodi Ruderon.

Start with a reporter who likes to be responsive to readers, is spontaneous and impressionistic...Put that reporter in one of the most scrutinized and sensitive jobs in journalism – the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times. Now add Facebook and Twitter...Words go from nascent, half-formed thoughts to permanent pronouncements to the world at the touch of a key. The result is very likely to be problematic. And for that bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren, who moved to Israel from New York earlier this year, and her editors at The Times, it has been.

In terms of social media, Ms. Rudoren has had a rocky start in her new position. Within a few days of taking the post, she had sent some Twitter messages that brought criticism, and had people evaluating her politics before she had dug into the reporting work before her...Ms. Rudoren regrets some of the language she used, particularly the expression “ho-hum.”

“I should have talked about steadfastness or resiliency,” she told me by phone on Tuesday. “That was a ridiculous word to use.” In general, she said, “I just wasn’t careful enough.”

Now The Times is taking steps to make sure that Ms. Rudoren’s further social media efforts go more smoothly. The foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, is assigning an editor on the foreign desk in New York to work closely with Ms. Rudoren on her social media posts.

The idea is to capitalize on the promise of social media’s engagement with readers while not exposing The Times to a reporter’s unfiltered and unedited thoughts...

Mr. Kahn described her reporting over the past month as “exemplary.”
Having taken on one of journalism’s toughest challenges, Ms. Rudoren deserves every chance to continue to show readers that she is a reporter whose only interest is in telling the story engagingly and truthfully.

I left this comment:

i guess this is a reporter's revolution in process, changing the matrix from "i am a newspaper's reporter" to "i report what i observe in whatever medium is at my disposal".

^

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