New ‘WSJ’ Conduct Rules Target Twitter, Facebook
NEW YORK Staffers at The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday were given a newly compiled list of rules for “professional conduct,” which included a lengthy guide for use of online outlets, noting cautions for activities on social networking sites.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Wall Street Journal handed staffers a compiled 'professional conduct' list whose longest section is a guide to online outlets, with explicit cautions for activity on social networks like Twitter and Facebook — an internal rulebook arriving just as the platforms themselves were formalizing theirs: days earlier, in early May 2009, Facebook adopted community-voted Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, updated its Platform Policy for developers, and added friend filters to the redesigned News Feed.
The memo matters because it marks a publisher drawing a line around behavior on channels it does not own: a reporter's Facebook profile or Twitter account is now treated as an extension of the masthead rather than private space. No wider press pickup of the internal document appears in the record, which suggests the rules were meant to govern quietly before anyone tested them publicly.
First-order effects
- WSJ staffers now post to Twitter and Facebook under a written employer code, converting personal accounts into monitored extensions of the paper's standards rather than discretionary spaces.
- Journal editors gain an enforcement basis — documented cautions they can point to — replacing ad hoc judgment whenever a staffer's social activity touches on sourcing, scoops, or the paper's reputation.
Second-order effects
- Competing newsrooms come under pressure to codify equivalent policies instead of improvising case by case, because an unmanaged reporter account carries the outlet's brand weight onto platforms the publisher neither hosts nor moderates.
- For Twitter and Facebook, newsroom conduct rules make journalists a distinct user class whose employers police their output — shifting some moderation burden from platform policy to newsroom policy.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, every journalist's public feed becomes an extension of employer liability, pushing publishers to review social posts much as they review bylined copy and setting up recurring friction between real-time reporting instincts and print-era conduct codes.
- The longer arc points toward externally enforced norms: once newsrooms self-regulate staffer social use, regulators and industry bodies have a template to formalize — turning what began as an internal memo into a sector-wide governance question.
The trend: Publishers are responding to staff presence on social platforms with formal conduct codes that treat personal feeds as part of the edited product — a governance layer being built atop networks the publishers don't control.