Employee PR responsibilities and 'brand journalism'

Chapter five of Share This deals with many issues regarding how employers and employees should use social media. The author discusses how an employee's personal account should strengthen the reputation of their company, not diminish it.

However, I found this policy concept interesting when applying it to journalists. Take Richard Deitsch for example.

Deitsch is a senior editor for Sports Illustrated who regularly covers the media itself. While one might think that he would just promote Sports Illustrated articles in his tweets, Deitsch does anything but that. He promotes journalism of all kinds, from many different publications.

Deitsch even has a weekly column where he highlights some of the week’s best journalism, with many of the links directing readers to stories that were written by journalists from other publications. He also supports analysts from competing sports media networks, such as ESPN, via Twitter. In the midst of the disappointing Daisha Simmons situation at Alabama, Deitsch has taken to Twitter to pair up with ESPN’s Jay Bilas to rebel against Alabama’s decision.

In this sense, I don’t think that journalists share the same ‘company PR’ responsibilities that employees at other organizations do while using social media. While journalists must still maintain a professional style, I think that they also must follow their ethical duties as journalists.

Because journalists often behold a sense of credibility when it comes to commenting on important, ethical issues (such as the Daisha Simmons situation), I think that they must stand for what’s right, even if that means promoting the opinions of journalists from competing networks.

In conclusion, I think that ethical responsibilities require journalists to sometimes promote other brands on social media, which makes the concept of ‘brand journalism’ seem slightly skewed. Competing brands in journalism don’t seem to operate quite the same as brands in other market sectors do.