Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Browser cookies, as unkillable as cockroaches, won’t be leaving Google Chrome after all
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Aug. 26, 2014, 2:53 p.m.
Audience & Social
LINK: qz.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   August 26, 2014

Facebook too, according to this story in Quartz by Sruthijith KK.

Hundreds of journalists working at the Times of India and its sister publications have received a peculiar request from their employer: hand over your Twitter and Facebook passwords and let us post for you.

Even after you leave the company.

Under a contract unveiled to employees last week, Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd—India’s largest media conglomerate and publisher of the Times of India, Economic Times, among many other properties—told staffers they are not to post any news links on their personal Twitter and Facebook accounts. This runs counter to many social-media policies in newsrooms across the world, which often encourage journalists to share content widely.

But BCCL, as the company is known, is telling journalists that they must start a company-authorised account on various social media platforms. They also have the option of converting existing personal social media accounts to company accounts. On these, they are free to discuss news and related material. The company will possess log-in credentials to such accounts and will be free to post any material to the account without journalists’ knowledge. It is now also mandatory to disclose all personal social-media accounts held by the journalist to the company.

In other words, use social media for work — but either give us permanent control of the account or set up a new one that won’t benefit you personally after you leave.

Control of personal social media accounts continues to be one of the more interesting labor/management battle lines in news.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Browser cookies, as unkillable as cockroaches, won’t be leaving Google Chrome after all
Google — which planned to block third-party cookies in 2022, then 2023, then 2024, then 2025 — now says it won’t block them after all. A big win for adtech, but what about publishers?
Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would
“The relationship he has uncovered is more like the co-dependence seen in a destructive relationship, or the way we relate to addictive products such as tobacco that we know are doing us harm.”
BREAKING: The ways people hear about big news these days; “into a million pieces,” says source
The New York Times and the Washington Post compete with meme accounts for the chance to be first with a big headline.