Yes. I think who has been hired where — and who hasn’t, and for what reasons — is what’s really at the bottom of all this bizarre, addled invective. Good luck to you, sir. 

“Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day.”
That’s the first sentence of the guideline. Seems to me that would eliminate the retweeting of your own opinion.

If people plan to keep finding these “loopholes,” I would point out this: I doubt AP is going to allow much gray area on this topic. No RT opinions without quotes or punctuation that shows those are not the writer’s opinion. Seems straightforward and fairly simple to follow.

Best case, you’re being willfully disingenuous. Worst case … well that would be an insult. My main point, which you’re conspicuously ignoring, is that it’s a convention on twitter that RTs aren’t endorsements. They don’t look like the writer’s opinion because they’re not, unless the writer says otherwise. AP also hasn’t indicated that readers are confused by its reporters’ RTs of opinions. I said that, too – just a heads-up. 

The only person beating the misplaced RT aspect into the ground is you. It does, however, fit in with the argument that AP doesn’t seem to now how Twitter works, and yet feels qualified to issue guidelines for using it. And even if people are beating it into the ground, you still haven’t addressed it. Indeed, you haven’t addressed anything other than your notion that everybody should just shut up and do what AP says, or else they aren’t “adults.”I still have no earthly idea what you’re talking about re: the book/cover stuff. You used more words, but they still conveyed no information.

Dan, we’re going in circles, which is the standard goal when journalists choose to resist basic guidelines. When they can’t win on the merits, they try to confuse.

We’re past a dozen mentions easily about the structure of the RT part. The point has been made. Again, that is not the point of this guideline. The point is for RTs not to look like either the writer’s opinion or an opinion the writer supports.

I was trying to avoid going off-topic with the “judging a book by its cover” example, but it does relate to my point of journalists far too often being unable to relate to concepts in a fashion that would follow with adults who claim to be of above-average intelligence. Most people learn early on that you don’t just create a flashy cover and then say that completes the job. But people in newsrooms have spent the last couple of decades resisting that concept or trying to unlearn it.

You can keep pointing out the structure of the RTs, but that’s been beaten into the ground.  

The RT being in the wrong place is central: it shows that AP’s managers have no clue as to what they’re talking about: they actually issued guidelines without having learned the most fundamental facts about the subject of those guidelines. Moving the RTs renders tweets insensible. I haven’t counted up all the previous mentions of this fact, but it’s still true and it’s still central to the issue.

If retweeting opinions “looks as if” they are the reporters’ own opinions, the problem is with the person doing the looking, not with the reporter. People who actually use twitter know that RTs don’t equal endorsements, and if someone doesn’t, they can easily be schooled. If they insist on remaining confused, that’s their problem entirely. 

This isn’t a “loophole” – it’s basic to how twitter works. If AP managers don’t know this, they shouldn’t be issuing guidelines until they learn (and people shouldn’t be spouting opinions about it until *they* learn). If they learn and decide they don’t like how twitter works, they can ban twitter use entirely, and then see how that works out for them. But they can’t just arbitrarily rewrite the rules and conventions of the medium they’re using.

Again, I haven’t seen any evidence that readers are confused by this, or have complained that AP reporters’ RTs seem to be their own opinions. Out of its pathetic fear of the bias cops, the AP is addressing a problem that isn’t actually a problem.

The New York Times doesn’t put a disclaimer on David Brooks’ columns indicating that Brooks’ opinions are his own, and not the paper’s. That’s a convention, and people understand it. 

I’m not sure what your “judge a book by its cover” bit is supposed to mean, so I can’t address it.

The guidelines don’t even comport with the most basic twitter conventions. And they force tweeters to add verbiage in an already restricted space just in case some confused or vindictive person might decide that retweets equal endorsements. Is this really a big problem for the AP, or any other news organization? If AP’s managers think it is, the actual problem runs deeper than twitter. Maybe the people complaining would act more like “adults” if their managers didn’t treat them like children.

Textbook example here of how too many journalists can’t follow a simple guideline like this one. The point seems simple: Don’t retweet without adding punctuation. Yet, as usual, people stumble over themselves to rail against a policy, even when they don’t really understand it (see, Carr, David).

This was/is a frequent pattern far too often in too many newsrooms. People who claim to be adults of above-average intelligence in an allegedly professional environment shouldn’t need things like this to be spelled out so frequently.

These policies seem arcane. Aren’t more and more journalists now blogging and showing a bit of personality with readers? It just seems like these strict rules take out the “social” in social networking and defeats the purpose of what Twitter, Facebook and the rest are all about. Journalists are human and humans share emotions and have opinions. Most of the world thinks the press is bias anyway, but most people can also tell when a story is fair or not. Am I wrong here? The game has changed so much that maybe these guidelines don’t exactly work anymore. This implies that a journalist cannot send any Tweet that reflects any type of personal opinion on any issue of the day. This also implies that a journalist covering the Ohio State legislature cannot tweet or retweet “#Occupy movement is annoying” because it contains a personal opinion, even though that journalist is not writing about the Occupy protests, and never will. Maybe I am an odd fellow, but I don’t mind when a journalist expresses an opinion, and I can tell when a story has a slant or bias—most stories do, whether intentional or not.

These policies seem arcane. Aren’t more and more journalists now blogging and showing a bit of personality with readers? It just seems like these strict rules take out the “social” in social networking and defeats the purpose of what Twitter, Facebook and the rest are all about. Journalists are human and humans share emotions and have opinions. Most of the world thinks the press is bias anyway, but most people can also tell when a story is fair or not. Am I wrong here? The game has changed so much that maybe these guidelines don’t exactly work anymore. This implies that a journalist cannot send any Tweet that reflects any type of personal opinion on any issue of the day. This also implies that a journalist covering the Ohio State legislature cannot tweet or retweet “#Occupy movement is annoying” because it contains a personal opinion, even though that journalist is not writing about the Occupy protests, and never will. Maybe I am an odd fellow, but I don’t mind when a journalist expresses an opinion, and I can tell when a story has a slant or bias—most stories do, whether intentional or not.

living in the stone age

Why be in denial that journalists have opinions? Not to mention, the RT format that they’re proposing goes against what are widely considered to be standard operating procedures for retweets. The RT should fall before the source and not at the beginning of the tweet. Come on, guys. Get with the program.